Prudence and Madness

(Warning: Lengthy post ahead. Keep reading at your own risk!)

There are such events that are worth getting tired feet and strained back muscles for. And an event which has Fully Booked and Neil Gaiman in it is an example of such.

I’ve known about this event weeks ago because I frequent Fully Booked SM the Block but I wasn’t able to make up my mind about it until almost the last minute (okay, that’s an exaggeration. I must have weighed this on my mind until the day itself when I’ve finally made a decision). The indecisiveness must be because I’ve been so drained of energy these past few weeks by work and study and since it’s another Sunday of being not on duty (actually, the first of a series of Sundays of being not on duty), I thought of just spending it resting and relaxing at home.

But it isn’t everyday that Neil Gaiman is in the Philippines. And I haven’t been to Fully Booked in the Fort. And I didn’t want to go to church. So, obviously, I’ll go see Neil Gaiman in Fully Booked (or to be more accurate, outside Fully Booked).

The Book of Dreams Event is the special launching of Expeditions, a compilation of the works, prose and comics, of the winners of the first year of Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards. It was held today, around 3 p.m., at the Bonifacio High Street Courtyard, in front of Fully Booked. Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards was started by Fully Booked with Neil Gaiman, if I remember correctly, in late 2005, with the first batch of awards given last year. The categories in PGFA include stories in prose and in comics.

Neil Gaiman said he started the PGFA, with Fully Booked, because he wanted to encourage Filipino unrealism stories. He noticed that we have too much of the traditional realism stories but unrealism stories (stories of fantasy and sci-fi) that are essentially Filipino are still untapped, considering that we have the richest and coolest (yep, he said that) folklore. But seeing the potential in Filipinos, he wanted to encourage more writings (and drawings) and he found PGFA as being a good way to do so.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s more to this event than just Neil Gaiman praising Filipino prose and comics.

The event didn’t start on time (was this because the event is here in the Philippines and organizers were following Filipino time or was it because of some unforeseen or uncontrollable circumstances? But anyway…). People, of course, being Filipinos and impatient have started chatting and getting all noisy (and maybe noticing that Snooky Serna was there with us in the crowd, watching out for Neil Gaiman too. And she’s prettier in person, I think. She’s aging gracefully). Karen Kunacwitz (I hope I got that spelling right. If I didn’t, please tell me so I could correct myself for the nth time) and Gabe Mercado were the hosts of the event and were able to hold the attention of the crowd while Neil Gaiman is still “missing” but it was Mastermind Eric Mana who was able to mesmerize people with his mentalist tricks.

Eric Mana with his “victim”, Nicole

I’ve got a video of one of the magic tricks he did there. Just access it on my multiply site. It’s just a 3gp movie though because I’ve only my camera phone with me then.

And he gave quite a distraction, doing several tricks by groups of people and then returning to the stage to prey upon the VIP guests, haha.

He doesn’t claim that he’s psychic or anything. In fact, he said everything he does is scientific. He even shared a little secret about his “magic”. He said that when he’s trying to read the minds of his audience (or the “victims” or volunteers), he observe their breathing patterns and facial expressions because it gives him the clue as to what he has to guess.

And, of course, the grand entrance of Neil Gaiman (which happened around 4:30 p.m.), the honorable guest of the event…is a part of Eric Mana’s last magic trick for the event.

The Man We’ve All Been Waiting To See and Hear

What’s that white board he’s carrying?

Eric Mana’s last trick involved a series of random numbers, supplied by the audience, which, after being jumbled and added up, resulted into a 4-digit number, 1089. He said that the first 3 digits will point to a specific page of the Mirrormask book. It was page 108. He asked one of the audience to look for the longest word there. This was the time when he called Neil Gaiman to march up to the stage with his white cardboard. The guy in the audience said that the longest word in page 108 is quintessentially. And when Neil Gaiman turned the white cardboard around…

…there’s the copy of entire page 108 on the white cardboard. And if you counted the line numbers, line number 9 contained the word quintessentially. I didn’t know how Eric Mana managed to do that from a set of random numbers given by the audience (or maybe he just found a way to manipulate the numbers so it would always result into 1089). But, of course, that’s a good magic trick for you, if you just can’t figure it out at first glance.

Of course, the question and answer portion of the show came, with the hosts drawing up questions written and submitted by the audience before the show started. Some of the questions that came up were:

• When are we going to see the Endless on film and who would play Dream (yourself excluded)?
• What is the important ingredient for creating a dark character?
• What is the impact of being a father to two kids on your writing?

Well, at least, those were good questions and I’m glad nobody asked where he got inspiration from as a writer.

As for the first question, he already has the script for it and might be the movie director (so he tagged along or “shadowed” Guillermo del Toro in Budapest, where he’s filming Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, which is set to be shown in July 11, 2008. He said he did so for two weeks so as to learn the ropes of movie directing) but that he just can’t do anything with the script for now because he’s also part of the writers’ strike. And if he were to choose who’d play Dream…well, it’s just for him to know and for us to find out, he said. Haha.

But I’m really looking forward to that Endless movie and I do hope it’ll happen. It’s been years since my college friends and I speculated who would be playing the seven Endless, hoping that Winona Ryder will play Death, Johnny Depp as Dream, and Angelina Jolie as Desire. But for now, all we can do is wait, wait, and wait…

As for the second question, Neil Gaiman said that, in order to create a convincing dark character, one has to think of things that really scared you. An example he gave for this is that when he as a lot younger, he’s afraid that, while he’s at school, his parents might forget about him, pack up their belongings and move away and then another set of parents that looked exactly like his parents would move in their house. So, it’s one scary story that a writer could use, if he’s writing a children’s story.

For the third question, Neil Gaiman said that it’s good that he has kids around because he’s able to “steal” ideas from them. The example he gave for this was that there was a time, when his son was still young (Neil brought his son with him and he’s even taller than his dad!), he told him to do something and his son didn’t want to. His son said that he didn’t want a daddy anymore because a daddy makes him do things he doesn’t want to do and hopes to have a goldfish instead. That gave Neil Gaiman the idea for the title of his book, The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish. Another example was that when Maddy, his daughter, was younger, she woked up her dad because there are wolves coming out of her bedroom wall. That gave Neil the idea for the title of the book, The Wolves in the Walls.

Then comes the part when they acknowledge the winners of the first Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards and announced the winners of the 2nd Philippine Graphic Awards. Interestingly, a couple of winners from the first batch also won this year. Makes me wonder if there weren’t much entries submitted this year that they have to pick someone who has already won before. Hmmm…

What I liked about Neil Gaiman is that he is honest in his criticisms. He wasn’t all praise for the winning entries. He noticed that the quality of the entries for the comics category isn’t really that better than that of last year. In fact, there isn’t a first place winner in the comics category this year. Neil Gaiman said he hopes that next year, the comics writers will be able to do better. As for the winning entries in the prose category, he’s all praise and even noted that the first place winning entry is ready to be published and brought to world-class stage, if it were to be made into a film or play and it can even be an illustration too.

Now, that really got me curious and I hope they’ll make the compilation of the 2nd year Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards winners soon so I could read all the good stuff.

After all the awards and ceremonies, of course, came the drawing of the winners of the raffle. During this part, though, I escaped from the crowd and went back to Fully Booked building because I was already getting hungry and I wanted to browse more books. After a quick chow of sausage roll and a tall cup of Coffee Jelly Frappuccino and a little browse of the books, I checked with the customer service if they have the list of the raffle draw winners.

And guess what? I won a bookmark signed by Neil Gaiman! Yey! Yup, I’m fine with that. Thank you.

And, of course, I bought the Expedition books, both the prose and comics volume, and got the prose volume with Neil Gaiman’s signature on it too.

And before I confuse everybody else, let me just get it straight: I got the signed bookmark because I bought the books. Buying the books entitled me to a raffle entry which, in turn, got drawn and led to winning a signed bookmark. I hope all is clear now. Haha. To think that I’ve even considered joining in the PGF, I’m not that good in weaving a story.

So, even with aching feet and a strained back from standing too long, I got home tired but happy. I could have spent the day having much needed rest but postponing it earned me good memories of the day when Neil Gaiman set foot on Bonifacio High Street courtyard and heard his stories, as spoken in the flesh. And that, for me, will always be worth all my time and effort. And now that I’ve seen him, I’d be able to put, not just a face, but a true character, on all that I read on his online journal and his books and graphic novels.

I’ll be looking forward to seeing him next year when he comes back for the third year of Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards. Hopefully.

(Congratulations if you got this far! Nope, I’m not going to award you with anything because you were able to do so.  I’m just thankful that you did and hopefully I didn’t bore you.)

Filed under: Events, People by Prudence