When the Sandman Visits

Last night I dreamed of Neil Gaiman. The truth is, I have a lot of Neil Gaiman dreams. He has held more guest appearances in my dreams than any other person. Occasionally Amanda Palmer is in them, but most of the time it's only Neil.

I met Neil Gaiman (in real life) almost 15 years ago, not long after I started working in my first bookstore. He was touring for Stardust and at the time, I had yet to read Sandman or any other of his brilliant works. To me, then, he was simply a nice looking, nice sounding British gentleman. He was kind and witty. And because I wasn't yet a fan, I wasn't nervous or self-conscious.

After that meeting, he began to appear in my dreams. Sometimes I'll go months and months between these nocturnal encounters and other times I'll have several in a single week. They are, without a doubt, some of my favorite dreams and I often wake up feeling inspired. A year and a half ago I had one in which I was taking a writing class with Neil. In it, we didn't talk about writing, we talked about the importance of saying thank you. Odd, and yet somehow it seemed to make complete sense. I ended up writing a thank you email to a former writing professor who had taught me many important things about writing, about life.

Sometimes Neil and I simply hang out and the conversations we have don't have roots deep enough to hold on to the morning's consciousness. Last night, we were in my store. We were all dressed for a wedding and Neil was wearing this amazing black suit. The down escalator had been transformed into a slide. I grabbed my Neil-Obsessed-Co-Worker, and took a picture of him with Neil using one of the teen endcaps for a back-drop.

While I was at work yesterday I picked up the Chip Kidd designed book of Neil Gaiman's, Make Good Art. It is the physical manifestation of the speech he gave last year to Philadelphia's University of the Arts. When I got home, I sat down and read it. If you're on the internet at all, odds are you saw at least bits and pieces of it passing by. There were quotes almost everywhere I wandered. The speech struck a chord me as well as, it seemed, a million other people. (You can actually watch Neil deliver the speech by visiting here.)

Watch the video. Find the written speech online. Buy the brilliantly designed little book. Whether you are a creative type or not, there is something there for everyone. There were words held within those pages that I needed to find, right now and for always.

As I've talked about before, I've been scraping up my shins on the stumbling blocks of fear. The fear of failure, to be specific. Making good art isn't about creating something you know is going to work, something you know is going to be "good." That's boring, and so often misses the mark. Instead, I think Neil Gaiman is right. We should go and "make interesting, amazing, glorious, fantastic mistakes."