toledoblade.com --

Neil Gaiman can predict with certainty who you are, you who plan to attend his talk tomorrow.

"It's literate bipeds all the way," says Gaiman, an imaginative writer for all ages.

A few weeks ago, he correctly foretold that the audience for his appearance at the Edinborough Book Festival in Scotland would be literate bipeds. And indeed, they were.

"They were in age between 5 and 95, and there were some amazing tattoos and piercings, and there were also some amazing suits, and there were some amazing twin sets and pearls."

British-born Gaiman, 48, will open the 16th Authors! Authors! season at 7 p.m. in the Stranahan Theater tomorrow. The series is sponsored by The Blade and the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library.

And speaking of amazing, his career is nothing short of it.

He has a strong fan base from many years of writing comics and graphic novels, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. In January, his The Graveyard Book, illustrated by his long-time collaborator Dave McKean, won the prestigious Newbery Medal for children's literature. About it, a Newbery judge wrote: "A child named Nobody, an assassin, a graveyard, and the dead are the perfect combination in this deliciously creepy tale, which is sometimes humorous, sometimes haunting, and sometimes surprising."

He's written movie and book reviews, interviews with authors, song lyrics, a screenplay (2007?s Beowulf), and last month he directed a silent short film, Statuesque, featuring Bill Nye, in England. Gaiman's colorful girlfriend, Amanda Parker, a member of the Boston duo Dresden Dolls, portrays one of the human statues.

He wrote a fanciful essay about cities that's tucked into the computer game SimCity 2000. His vast Web page often includes lengthy, breezy blogs about his day-to-day.

"Mostly I do it all because I enjoy it. None of it yet feels anything like work. It still feels like I get paid for making stuff up," says Gaiman, father of three and an American citizen.

Gaiman's delivery is deliberate and quick to wit. He discussed his work with The Blade last week in a telephone interview from his home near Minneapolis.

His varied endeavors have a key element in common: they allow him to weave tales.

"A storyteller doesn't come medium-specific," he says, and proceeds to tell a wee story about that. "I assume if I was living 200 or 500 years ago, I'd be wandering from town to town."

But wouldn't it be better to be a storyteller in the king's court and have a nice home, steady paycheck, and health insurance?

"I'd much rather go from town to town. That way you get to tell tales you've told before. If you're telling the king a story every night, you'd have to come up with a really good new story. Otherwise, he might start sharpening his blade and looking at you meaningfully."

So why make an 8 ½-minute-long wordless film?

"The delight for me in putting together a silent movie was looking at the challenge of A) telling a story without words, and B) trying to construct a story in which you never felt you were missing words because nobody in the story happened to talk to anybody else. Everything that was going on emotionally was going on between people who weren't talking; they were just looking."

Many writers are mindful of their audience when selecting language and topic. Not so with Gaiman.

"Mostly my audience is still me," he says. "For Coraline (a 2002 youth book), I think the audience was me and my children because they got to be my guinea pigs. I read it to them when I finished."

It's more about the story than the audience, he observes, as if the story is its own creature.

"Coming up with something like The Graveyard Book, when I started writing it with a man holding a wet knife walking around a dark house, having disposed of three out of four members of the family, and on his way up the stairs to take out the baby, there's definitely part of me going 'is this appropriate for a children's book?' and I really have no idea. But it's definitely what happens in the story and it's where it begins. And I better trust the story. And I'm lucky that children and eventually the Newbury award committee trusted it too."

Gaiman enjoys a wellspring of creativity and a personality that wins frequent invites to the party.

"Like most of these things, 90 percent of my career seems to start with somebody saying 'would you be interested in doing A?' and me going "yes.' 'Would you like to do an essay to be a hidden Easter egg in SimCity?' and me going 'sure.'"

"Back in May a producer I knew in the U.K. said, 'I may be doing a series of short silent films for Christmas, would you like to do one?' and I said 'of course.'''

On the front burner is a project he's wrapping up for National Public Radio.

"I've done a journalistic piece on the rise and fall and rise again of audio books, and interviewed David Sedaris and people like that. It was the kind of thing that I love the idea of because NPR said, 'Would you like to do an eight-minute slot on Morning Edition doing anything you want?' And I felt how often does somebody get offered something like that? And I said 'yes!'

"It's a lot like being a kid being let loose in a candy store. You want to take one from each of the bottles on each of the shelves."

Neil Gaiman will speak at 7 p.m. tomorrow in the Stranahan Theater, 4645 Heatherdowns Blvd. He will not sign books, but the first 150 people to line up after his talk will receive an autographed bookplate. Tickets are $10; $8 for students. Information: 419-259-5266.

Contact Tahree Lane at:
tlane@theblade.com

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