Today, I spent twelve hours of my life in a cramped, artificially lit venue. Combined with the fact that I woke up early to get a good place in line, the experience left me with jetlag, only with a stickier sensation. I did it all so I could have some pasty complexioned Englishman deface a P1500 book with partially legible squiggles. Oddly enough, the experience left me quite happy.

The day started with me waking up an hour after the alarm clock went off, driving to Rockwell and hoping that the previous night's 'rally' was over. I made it to the line by 9am, to be joined by JoQ, who stayed with me on the even-numbers line, and a couple of toy collectors who opted to stay on the longer odd-numbers line. I spied Mr. Gaiman just before 10am making his way to the tent, walking with a rather relaxed shuffle. He wore black (as expected), with his signature leather jacket, sunglasses and tousled hair. The lined-up crowd evidently saw him as well and welcomed him by loud applause and shouting. It probably surprised him because he stood there for a few seconds and reacted in what he probably thought was the most appropriate way to greet an unusually noisy mob of excited fans - he waved his arms like a Muppet. The Fully Booked staff then started giving away numbers, and despite being a few feet ahead of my two collector friends, JoQ and I ended up being numbers 184 and 186 respectively while their numbers only went into the low 170's.

I spent the next five hours realizing that time tends to get slower when you're trying to kill it (since the 'Gathering' was slated to begin at 3pm). I had a drink with JoQ at Starbucks before Avid found us and asked for smaller bills to pay for his taxi fare. Given that that was their first meeting, I think Avid left JoQ with some post-traumatic stress, going into fanboy fits and ohmygod-ohmygod-ohmygod interjections throughout the conversation. A bunch of former officemates then found their way into Starbucks, so I joined them in trawling the mall, leaving JoQ to meet up with her brother. After a quick lunch at Shakey's with Avid, Camille, Cybs, Nelson and Tals, I met my toy collecting friends (being John, Eric and Iñigo) once again and ended up just talking with them during the last hour of the wait.

Finding my way to the end of the line (aptly described by Tals as an endless line), we entered the tent for the 'Gathering' to be met by a performance by local goth band The Late Isabel. Having been in a band before, I generally feel bad for artists who get invited to: 1.) open for a big foreign act, and 2.) play in non-musical events to a non-appreciative crowd. The event was more or less both of those combined and I felt bad for the band when the tent started emptying toward the end of their set. It was hardly the place to play a full set of songs, even if a significant number of the crowd seemed like 'goths.' The lyrics couldn't even be understood over the sound system.

With the air conditioners on the verge of breaking down, Mr. Gaiman took the stage right about 3:45pm and the crowd again showed him a proper Filipino welcome by applauding and shouting all at the same time with the kind of enthusiasm that would've put Beatlemania to shame. Less shocked at the racket by now, Neil said that having come from straitlaced Singapore, Manila was a surprising change (really?). He also said that he saw a group of several thousand people from his hotel and thought that it was a welcoming party of some sort (it's just lucky that he had to come into town right when we're in the middle of an embarrassing political crisis). He also noted that he found us to be noisier than the Brazilians. Ole! I think it wasn't so much the shouting as the frequency of the applause/shouting that he found amusing, as the crowd seemed to take every pause that he took as a cue to shout even more, making complete sentences something of a difficulty for the esteemed writer.

After addressing several questions, he got to read excerpts from his upcoming book, Anansi Boys, which he described as a funny novel, incorporating the funny themes of death and embarrassment. I've never been to a book reading before (while I try to avoid poetry readings like the plague), and I was delighted at the way Neil lovingly read his words in a warm English accent that suited the story nicely, never mind that he looked odd clutching his laptop while he read.

The signing then pushed through around 5pm, interrupted only by a press kit screening of MirrorMask (a cinematic collaboration between Neil and long-time associate Dave McKean produced by the Jim Henson Company).

The numbers were being called in batches of 30, except the first few batches apparently included sponsors among them. I fell back in line when my batch was called and finally had my hardbound 1602 signed at around 8:30pm. Looking at Mr. Gaiman choose a black marker from his arsenal of no less than twenty pens, I simply asked him about a conspicuously missing character in 1602 (being a Marvel-ite) and received a rather simple answer that it was actually Marvel's prerogative, as they had other plans for him. I then asked to shake his hand like a true fanboy, congratulating myself for not fumbling my lines this time (I saw several fans break down after meeting him so I told myself to just discard my fanboy tendencies for that moment).

Thankful that Power Plant follows a flat rate parking fee policy, I headed back to the parking level, unmindful of the leftover pseudo goths and gothettes, gushing fanboys (and fangirls, i have to add), literati collectives, and other random characters sprawled inside the Rockwell tent, which already felt like a makeshift refugee camp. I heard that the signing continued well past midnight, with an expected spillover of people at the Greenhills and Gateway signings.

After this leg of his book tour, Mr. Gaiman would have easily signed several thousand books. He genuinely seemed like a very nice guy, but having been ferried from one interview to the next in quick succession and being shouted at every so often by the crowd, I wondered if Manila would leave him not only with a hurting hand but with several unresolvable issues as well. He did state at one point that, having already visited this place, it would not be impossible for him to write about it at some point. The crowd - again - shouted their appreciation at that little announcement of his, and I hoped that whatever he eventually gets to write about the Philippines wouldn't incorporate funny themes of death and embarrassment.

You can check out his journal here: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/.

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