On Neil Gaiman's birthday...

I had the dumbest conversation with someone today.

ME: You must know who David Bowie is. "Space Oddity"? "Under Pressure"? dum dum dum doo bee dum dum...

FRIEND: Uh... no. "Under Pressure" is by Vanilla Ice.

ME: Wh... ?

FRIEND: Yes.

ME: You're kidding me, you don't honestly think that? It's by Queen and David Bowie, Vanilla Ice sampled it like with Jason Derulo and...

FRIEND: Shut up. That version is rubbish.

I don't think I've ever wanted to slap somebody so hard.

So I finished watching The Only Way Is Essex, a guilty pleasure, and got in and out of the shower. I have a little more to add to my wordcount today, because 40,000 is a nice, neat number to end on for the day, and I swear I'm not procrastinating but I can't possibly write a novel when my hair is wet?! So I came to write here, and today I may actually have something worthwile to say.

Today is Neil Gaiman's fiftieth birthday. Neil Gaiman is a very, very brilliant writer. You'll have heard of him because of Stardust, Coraline, and maybe even the Sandman graphic novels/comics but the reason I like Neil Gaiman so much is because of his short stories.
I'll tell you a story about how I came across Neil Gaiman.
When I was around twelve years old, I really liked a computer game called The Sims 2, and I ended up joining the EA Games UK forum. I made some friends there and a lot of them seemed pretty into a band called The Dresden Dolls. This was a long time ago and I didn't really appreciate music like that back then, but I did love the song Delilah which I still have on my iPod from the first time around.
I came across The Dresden Dolls again rather recently, because a year or so I started listening to Amanda Palmer.
I don't just like listening to Amanda Palmer because of her music. I think that that's only a proportion of the reasons she is awesome, the other being the internet. Every so often I will read one of Amanda Palmer's blog entries and start to shake a little, because it portrays exactly something I've felt, or I will hope to feel. A few days ago, Amanda wrote here about a band she loved in her teens called The Legendary Pink Dots, and it made me smile and laugh and feel about twenty times, because it's exactly how I want to live.
I heard of Neil Gaiman, of course, through Twitter, because he's Amanda's fiancé and also the favourite writer of a lot of friends I've made in the last year. These things lead me to go read something by Neil Gaiman, simply out of curiosity. One weekend I was shopping with some of my friends and searched almost violently through all the shelves for anything by Neil Gaiman. I bought Stardust, in amazement that I'd had no idea it was a novel first, and Fragile Things, the book of short stories that in certain ways has changed the way that I see the world.
I suppose all of that was my way of telling you to read Neil Gaiman novels, listen to Amanda Palmer and The Dresden Dolls and maybe even The Legendary Pink Dots.

NaNoWriMo is going very well - by the time anyone reads this, I hope I'll probably have reached forty thousand words. Most of it is garbage, but I'm proud of me. Forty thousand words is a lot of words, to write in a week and a bit. Plus, my homework isn't getting too neglected either; no NaNo inflicted detentions, yet. Yay. :)

Now I have to go. I have to write 1k more, and listen to a band called Hollywood Undead to prove to my friend that I'm open-minded.