Richard Butchins's Blog: Angels stand corrected... - Posts Tagged "book"

As I realise that everybody has become obsessed with celebrities and the best way to get your attention is to write about them. I am going to do just that. Today I'll tell you about meeting the "rock star" author Neil Gaiman.

I was travelling the roads from Portland Oregon to Austin Texas in a 1988 Bluebird school bus (the old yellow ones) The bus had been converted to run on vegetable oil - which was stolen from the back of diners along the route. I was filming a self professed "freak show" on the road. It was weird. At a stop in the aptly name town of Eureka in Northern California I found a greasy paperback at the back of the bus. American God's by a guy called Neil Gaiman. I looked interesting and I had a lot of time to kill, I had no idea who this Mr Gaiman was, but I really enjoyed the book. It seemed an ideal travel companion for my strange journey.

Cut to a year later and the documentary I made was finished - It was called the"Last American Freak Show" (way before American Horror Story stole the title) and I was in London. In the meantime I had investigated the mysterious author of the book American Gods. Turns out he's a graphic novel superstar. I read a couple more of his books and liked them. One day someone I knew (I forget who) was working on a TV show that Mr Gaiman was on and told me I should tweet him about my film. He might like it they said. I did. Amazingly he replied and I sent him a copy of the film and in due course he watched it and yes he liked it - a lot. This is what he said:

"It's remarkable. The first five minutes were the documentary I thought it would be. And then it becomes something much more real, and sadder and odder - for me it's, strangely, much more about America and what it does to people, and about the relationship between the observer and the observed, and about holding onto love when you don't have anything else, and about pain."

I was impressed and grateful, of course, Mr Gaiman was less busy and less famous back in 2009 when this happened, but we arranged to meet. I had an idea to make a documentary with him and he was into the idea. We had sushi - he paid. Unfortunately the TV channels were not keen on the idea and it never got made (that's not to say it never will).

That's my little story about a celebrity and I am pleased to say he is a very real and genuine person.

Please check out my debut novel here: Pavement thoughts of a serial killer

it's all true......perhaps


The sun glints off the dirty green water. It’s not deep, maybe five or six feet at best, perhaps less. It had been cleared of most of its underwater junk in the 1980s and it’s usable.

There are basins where narrowboats are permanently parked up with people living on them, a fantasy of a bohemian travelling life complete with broadband and satellite communications, never far from the upmarket restaurants, bars and clubs of the city. The grimy warehouses of the past have been removed and replaced by luxury new-build apartments or reconditioned into slick, feel poor, live rich, lo-fi, hi-tech, media villages.

Nothing is left of the industry that caused the canal to come into existence in the first place. The tall new white buildings alongside the canal are topped with penthouse apartments that gaze down at the old canal.Through the floor-to- ceiling glass windows, I can see little people, like figures on a wedding cake.

I snake along the path, nobody noticing me. I hug the walls and dart under the bridges. I am not in a hurry. It’s just the way I walk: fast, urgent and with purpose, even though I have none.

My publisher has reduced the price of the E version to under a pound - buy while it's hot - click on the link below

buy the E version here...

thanks

A week or two back I was on a podcast for the UK online magazine Disability Now talking about my book. Here's a link (but I have not listened to it myself)

http://www.disabilitynow.org.uk/podca...

Enjoy (and let me know what I sound like)...

That' s a comment I received about my book Pavement.

He was right....guess you'll just have to read it and see.

Welcome to my nightmare - literally.