One of the things you must understand for this story to make sense is that, when I was in the third grade and newly transferred to public school, all the girls in my year formed "The Friendship Club" while I was out with the chicken pox, and for the rest of the semester I was patently excluded from all activities.
This wasn't as much of a blow as it might be expected - most of the girls in my class were rather idiots, I made friends with the girls I went out of class with for advanced reading, and there were some very nice boys who ended up being gay who took to me like ducks to water.
What this really means is that for the rest of my life I have had the sneaking, subcutaneous suspicion that the cool kids are all off hanging out without me.
The other thing you have to understand, outside of the future gay boyfriends, is that for many of my formative years I had books instead of friends, then books with a side of friends, and even now I hope the dilemma of house-on-fire, what-do-you-save thought problem never presents itself as an actual book vs. people problem. (You can't expect books to rescue themselves the way people can!)
Around the time I started giving friends the same consideration as hardbacks was around the time they started saying "Oh, you must read Neil Gaiman!" So I went dutifully to the library, got a nice think book, and would have done better to beat my head against the text. I simply could not get through it. It was similar to an experience I would have in calculous class - a white fog rose up from the floor and enveloped my fizzing brain until I regained consciousness an hour later, wondering what I had missed.
This is not to say he's not a fine writer, this is just to say I have no idea at all.
So time goes on, like it always does, and I keep some friends and lose some others, but all the while collecting Diana Wynne Jones and defending Robin McKinley. I took a poetry class in college that lead me to, of all things, an online perfume company that would make a custom, organic, pure perfume blends based on your favorite gothic poem. Neil Gaiman turned on Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab too - selling perfume for charity, at that.
All the while I was listening to The Dresden Dolls, and then up and out of nowhere the lead singer went and married Mr. Gaiman. I was starting to get a little nervous.
Even when he showed up authoring the forward to one of Ms. Jones' books (I think it was Dogsbody?) in the cheap paperback Firebird put out after her death I told myself firmly that I was being silly.
So I went ahead and took the plunge and started doing a little Google-fu, and what should pop up on his website but a photo of Neil Gaiman and Diana Wynne Jones with the caption explaining the photo was taken by Robin McKinley.
At that point I put myself in bed and hoped I would wake up in 1994 with the chicken pox and get a do-over. No such luck. I woke up me, overly well read, pick-about-fantasy me, friend to awkward feminists and future gay men me...
...and still not part of The Friendship Club.
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