I had never heard of Neil Gaiman until about 4 years ago. I didn't read comics (I mean I'm not a boy) and although I like SciFi/Fantasy as a genre I'd missed his imput to it. I was surprised when all my friends talked about him as one of their favorite writers, after all I thought I'd never heard of him.
But I had. I'd grown up listening to stories of my parent lives before my arrival, of their years in England, in the States. I'd heard all about their good friends David and Shelia Gaymen, David and Shelia had a son older than me, and a daughter who was married to a friend of my dad's. A few years ago David and Shelia were visiting their daughter (who lives 3 minutes walk from my parents house) and they had lunch. I found this out later. About the same time that I found out that they Gaymens were really the Gaimans and their son was the writer everyone had been talking to me about for years.
So I went online and read his blog. He was talking about how his house was cracked at the foundation and he would have to tear down part of it and rebuild. The thing was that very day I'd had an engineer over to my house, my house was cracked at the foundation and I would have to tear it down and rebuild it. Only difference I didn't have a penny to do it. So while Neil went to work on fixing up his old historic house I kept living in my rapidly decaying non-historic badly built piece of shit.
Another couple of years went past till I actually picked up a Neil Gaiman book in the guest room of a friends'. I wanted it to be one of those books, one of those that grabbed me and kept me up reading as fast as I could forgetting that dawn was going to come. I wanted it to be one of those books that dragged me to the end then left me regretting I had finished it. I wanted it to be great. I wanted him to be one of the best writers I'd read, I wanted him to live up to everyone's acclaim. I read a couple of chapters and put it down, it was another year or so before I finished the book, because I just didn't care. I tried again, I read another of his books. Nothing. I felt nothing. I read another. Nothing. I looked for something to love but it was all pretty ordinary. Nothing about the plots grabbed me, I didn't care about the male characters, the female characters were thinner than tissue. I wanted to like his books and I didn't.
I wanted his books to be great. I wanted to say, well he's so much better than me as a writer. He's fantastic that's why he's famous and I'm not. But I didn't feel it.
Then his commencement speech was all over the internet and I watched it. And I heard him talk about his life and how he got to be a famous writer. He started as a journalist. That had been my plan. He'd gone after it despite everything. And I hated him. Because I didn't do that. I didn't go on to be a journalist despite that being the plan, because it didn't make enough money and my family needed money. I didn't go after writing despite everything because there was always something more important than myself, my parents, my husband, my kids there was always someone else to put my attention on, always something else more important that my needs, always something else more important than my desires or dreams.
And in the end it was no-one's fault but my own. And now I'm 42 years old. I've never cared enough to be truly successful at anything.
I was sitting watching IronMan 3 with my kids. It was an ok movie, not the best IronMan but one of the better action films anyway. I'd just sent off another screenplay to a screenplay competition and was waiting to hear back. Anyway I am sitting in the middle of a movie theatre and all of a sudden while explosion noises are going off all around me I realize. I realize that I'm not good enough. I realize that I've never written a script anywhere as good as this third knockoff of an old comic idea.
Three weeks later I get my notification from the screenwriting competition. I am not good enough. I didn't even make it through the first round. I didn't even make it to the last 1000 entries. I had in the past but not this time. It wasn't that I didn't win, I didn't even get in the top third.
I know that to break in you don't just have to be as good, you have to be great. And I wish I was. I feel like Neil Gaiman and I started on the same life and somewhere I just didn't try hard enough. I wish I loved his books, I wish I thought he was great, but since I don't I just feel robbed and mad. I feel like by virtue of being a woman and trying to be everything to everyone I've never put enough energy into being me into becoming great. I feel like somewhere inside there is greatness but I've never reached it, never tried hard enough to get to it.
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