Audrey Niffenegger had a sing-songy voice that I later described as ethereally smug. This isn't to imply that she was smug, merely that her cadence gave that irresistible sense that she knew things. If you were her, you would know and thus it is your own character flaw for failing to incarnate as Audrey Niffenegger.

Neil Gaiman, her interviewer for the evening, dressed all in black. Niffenegger wore a brown, flowered shirt over black, with tights going into boots. They seemed, in their outfits, like opposing forces: Gaiman the always night and Niffenegger the sort of late autumn day that should be more pleasant than it is. While Gaiman's default expression was open and amused, Niffenegger landed on a pout whenever not the immediate subject of attention.

Behind where they sat was a twenty-five foot projection of her artwork. She repeatedly pressed the point that she isn't really an author. This was something she just happened to stumble upon on her artistic journey. I had read the majority of her most famous work, The Time Traveler's Wife. While I do not feel she wasted my time, I am also able to innumerate its curious flaws. As always, two-thirds of my criticisms could boil down to "I am exceedingly jealous at the opportunities you have had and how dare you imply that being an author is something you do not care about with all your heart and soul?" The other third centers on her characters unquestioned privilege and persistent unlikability in the midst of a pedophile's chrono-displaced grooming.

She made clear that she had absolutely no intention of writing two novels, much as most people do not intend to get cancer and, having been cured through successive rounds of chemotherapy, they do not intend to suffer through it again. Usually, when she set out to make a book, pictures would replace the words until no words remained. Niffenegger hand bound the picture books that she made and, in her words, "only rich people could afford to buy them." I cannot process intentionally making something for so intentionally finite. I have told my publisher that they are welcome to carve my books into stone tablets if they believe there is market enough for that. Yet Niffenegger has had the luxury of making her art just for the sake of art, or for the sake of a few very rich patrons.

She says that no one would publisher her art books, though publishers tended to like them. Instead, she thought of herself as her own tiny publisher. She advises the audience, and Gaiman confirms, that the way to get an agent is not to bang on doors in New York City until someone relents, though this was a step in Niffenegger's success. In fact, she only found the agent of her dreams after thirty rejections or near misses.

Gaiman never much had to deal with this publishing struggle. He had been hired to write a book about Douglas Adams after having talked up his fanaticism at a party. Adams at first did not want any part of the book Gaiman wrote or its subsequent royalties. Once the rights sold in America (and once Adams saw just how much they sold for), Adams said he would generously take half the receipts.

I am fascinated with the stories of how people in my field, but experiencing far more success, achieved these lofty heights. Gaiman claims his big break was not the book he wrote about Douglas Adams but the time he took a trans-Atlantic flight with a portfolio of Dave McKean's artwork for the Sandman series. He realized that, if the plane went down, that was it, since there were no other copies. When he landed, he explained to an associate his career plan for the next few years and an agent offered herself up immediately.

Niffenegger's story was a little different. While in an art colony in Illinois, she sent off two manuscripts for The Time Travel's Wife to an editor and agent. The man at the post office guessed what they were and said, "I bless these manuscripts in the name of the post master general." That seemed to be enough. She was soon booked on the Today Show, though she makes a point of stating that she didn't even watch television, as though to make it seem that she had no idea that this was a Big Deal.

I had little urge to cut her any slack in her dealings with Gaiman on stage, her curious haughtiness, though they are ostensibly friendly. When, to goad her to talk further, Gaiman said, "Your next novel has graveyards and I wrote The Graveyard Book." Her response is an airy, "I have that effect on people." Causation would suggest instead that Gaiman influenced her, though of course graveyards are too general a subject to cause anyone to cite plagiarism. On this other hand, she quips that Doctor Who stole the idea of time traveler's wives from her and seems to mean it, even though the good Doctor has at least thirty years precedent over her novel. Perhaps these were meant only as jokes but, sitting as she did across from the scribe for one of my favorite episodes of the series, "The Doctor's Wife," it can't help but feel barbed.

What slack I can give her is that she did act in the capacity of semi-professional guide at the infamous Highgate Cemetery, in whose east side dear Douglas Adams lays interned, though she disparages that people litter his grave with pencils and towels rather than sushi and tea. She alluded to the fact that she had seen the fabled Highgate vampire, but didsn't find this story interesting enough to detail onstage. Jean Pittman, the reputed Dragon of Highgate, hired Niffenegger, finding Niffenegger's intentions and devotion worthy enough. She stated that her favorite of all the graves was that of George Wombwell, a traveling menagerist who, when faced with the sudden death of his elephant and a competitor thus advertising that they had the only live elephant at the fair responded with a banner proclaiming that he had the only dead one. The grave itself is an enormous lion in repose, as it befitting such a showman.

That night as always, I leaned toward Gaiman because he gives me enough light. Unlike Niffenegger, who appeared to regard her novels as mistakes she made while trying to create sketches and paintings, Gaiman was not shy about disclosing the pain of his authorial labors. He admitted that, when anything goes wrong in his story, he is convinced that he cannot write and had never written, which is largely how I comport myself: surprising successes while certain I have failed. Niffenegger felt, not erroneously, that the idea itself is unimportant (however much she implies she is due credit for things that exists quite well before her). "You get so many ideas, they are like air. Discerning what is good and then asking questions of them is the trick." She tells of a fan who wrote her a letter suggesting that he had an idea for her next novel, though I sense she discards anyone who believes they are her fan for her writing rather than her art. This anonymous person said that she should write "The Time Traveler's Daughter," and "we can split the money."

Shortly after this, Gaiman and Niffenegger left the stage and much of the crowd dissipated. I chatted with my friends a little while, not wanting the night to be over yet, not when I stood beside on the very stage that had held my idol. Amber and Daniel jokingly dared me to dart up on the stage and drink from the same glass where Gaiman had, as though it were a holy relic with some curative powers. Neil Gaiman's Backwash: Eliminates Writer's Block on contact! I declined, though it stirred in me a notion.

I am not proud to admit that I did a very low grade stalking of Gaiman once. After the first A Night with Neil Gaiman, I knew Gaiman was going to be eating at a restaurant down the street from my apartment. To eat with Gaiman cost $500 a ticket. Amber said she had no problem with me going alone, but I couldn't justify the expense. Were it somewhere less convenient, I wouldn't have proceeded further than cursing my luck. Instead, Daniel, Amber, and I rushed over to the restaurant after the talk. I felt as though I were doing something naughty getting a table and ordering a particularly succulent, $15 tentacle to eat while we waited for Gaiman and party to arrive.

Of course, the restaurant seated Gaiman's party in a separate room from the plebes. I could see them when I went to the bathroom, but I couldn't entertain any fantasy where I achieved more than awkwardness and shame by crossing the threshold without having coughed up the requisite fee. I left one of my cards on the mirror of the bathroom, knowing it would come to nothing but it allowed me a lottery ticket of a chance. Gaiman or a rich associate would find the card, he would vaguely recall my rather odd last name from the covers of the books I gifted him once, and... that was as far as the fantasy would allow itself. The best I could envision was that a few of Gaiman's neurons would make a connection.

On Black Turkey Day, my annual Post-Thanksgiving feast of friends and bad movies, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer announced on social media that they would be selling and signing at a variety of local bookstores. Amber excused me from dinner preparations to go, with the understanding that I would get Amanda Palmer to sign her ukulele in payment.

I filmed them reading a story to an adorably impudent little girl, then resumed my place in the signing line. A dozen people before me chitter exuberantly to the two of them, swearing that Gaiman and/or Palmer had changed their lives. Watching strangers confide this, each one saying almost the same thing, watered my discomfort. When it was my turn, I handed Gaiman books and tried to give him the context of the couple of times our paths had crossed in the life and on the internet. He nodded, pretending he remembered any of these, but I know he didn't. I felt embarrassed, knowing I would do the same in his shoes.

When I tweet a link to the video, the bookstore retweets it. Then Neil Gaiman does. Then Amanda Palmer does. Then nothing.

No matter how close we may feel we are with celebrities, it is parasocial; it goes entirely in one direction. I know Gaiman - I know, at least, the public persona Gaiman presents to the world - but he has thought of me for perhaps two minutes of this life. I accept this because I am not unhinged. My brain can conflate coincidence (my literary idol started teaching at the factual version of the fictional college my characters attend a year after I moved here? It's a little too perfect to be true.) Intimacy that only one party knows about is no intimacy at all. To Gaiman, I am one of millions of fans. To me, there is only one Gaiman. To do otherwise is to step through the doorway of that restaurant months ago. Maybe Gaiman would know me then, but he certainly wouldn't like me. More important, I would like myself less for trespassing.

The Gaiman who is important to me is not made of flesh and blood but the combination of his work and the moments through which it pulled me. I have a construct. I won't say I wouldn't trade my Gaiman thoughtform for dinner with the actual one, but I am unwilling to pretend the Gaiman I have - the one important to me - doesn't have value. He is the one I know, the one with whom it is not unbalanced to feel a connection, and I cannot mistake him for the real Gaiman, trying to press Audrey Niffenegger to give fuller answers on stage at Bard College.

Soon in Xenology: No Such Convention.

last watched: 12 Monkeys
reading: Prince Lestat
listening: Sia

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