My Writerly Blog

Neil Gaiman got an interesting question at the reading last week: how does he come up with such wonderful names? Coraline was a typo (he misspelled Caroline on a letter, and thought the result was lovely). Richard Mayhew was a combo of Richard Curtis (director of Love Actually and Four Weddings and a Funeral , among others), and a friend whose last name was Mayhew. The character suited his namesakes in his sort of bumbling, unexpected charm. Nobody Owens comes from the verse that appears in the book, a line including "nobody owns". These names seem easy, particularly to an author as clever as Gaiman. But he did reveal that some names don't come easily, and he searches and searches and searches until inanimate objects like chairs seem to offer suitable monikers. For me, this is how it is every single time I need to name something. I once had a ferret named Ferret-head. (Best ferret I ever had, by the way.) I keep the US Census Bureau's list of names (sorted by...

I played hooky last night. I played fangirl. I giggled madly throughout the evening, like I imagine my mom might have about Paul McCartney, back in the day. I've lived in LA, worked in movie studios, met big stars. None of them made me giddy the way meeting Neil Gaiman did. Neil Gaiman! His book American Gods inspired my current work-in-progress, and his cross-media talents have fed into my desire to create a multi-media visual novel for my PhD. What I would be working on now, what I would be writing without Neil's influence is an existential mystery beyond my puny powers of imagination. It was an experience all about the fans - some had expressed dismay that a favorite music act ( Paul & Storm and Jonathan Coulton ) were playing Manchester the same night. So Neil calls the musicians up, and has them play "the world's shortest set" to open up the reading. They set the tone for Neil's reading from The Graveyard Book nicely with songs about how hard...