Dissolution started off as a nightmare. I was running, hard. I was so scared I thought I was going to choke. All I knew was that two men in suits were chasing me and that they were ruthless. And that they didn’t want me, not really. They were chasing a number. A body. An asset.

Now, my family is pretty much almost entirely in healthcare (I’m the black sheep. Baaaa). And I took enough biology and read enough history about World War II to know the absolutely horrifying things people have done to those they consider subhuman in the name of science. So I knew what the suits were going to do to me when they caught me. And I knew I was going to be alive for most of it.

The terror burned the idea into my brain, where it sat for years. It grew into a half-formed story, set in a dark, cyber-punkish world of mega-corporations. I wrote some scenes and then stopped. It was too big a story. Too terrible. I wasn’t ready.

Then two things happened.

1. I studied Law

I still remember reluctantly enrolling in the compulsory Corporations Law subject for my law degree. As chance (and my lazy timetabling choices) would have it, a few months later I found myself sitting in a class taught by Dr. Eric Windholz.

All you need to know about Dr. Windholz is this: he is an excellent, searing lecturer and an independently fascinating man. He is also one of those rare beings who can entirely justify his cynicism because he’s been on both sides of the fight—as general counsel for Phillip Morris and as General Manager of Strategic Programs & Support at WorkSafe Victoria. And I will never forget the chill that ran through me when he looked each of us in the eye and told us that companies were alive: that they could marry, divorce, give birth . . . and die.

That wasn’t the last of his lessons. I’d grown up the way I think most of us have, on a scale ranging from a faint distrust of corporations to full-blown hatred. Resident Evil certainly did not help. But Dr. Windholz challenged that by the simple method of asking us what a company was.

After we all invariably gave the wrong answer, his sadism relented and he told us his definition: a group of people who had decided to get together formally to pursue a common goal. That was it.

It made me realize something that should have been obvious to me, to everyone, but wasn’t: that companies aren’t inherently evil. They’re literally just a legal structure that people have used to protect themselves while they go after what they want—whether that’s mining for profits or setting up orphanages. And just that little shift in thinking is actually very empowering. Multinational corporations may seem like unstoppable behemoths if you’re looking at the legal structure. But if you blink and focus on the people smiling back from their corporate profiles, you realize that they’re just people. Probably Photoshopped people, but people nonetheless. And people can change their minds.

That’s not to say that corporate structures don’t have their own issues. Just like what happens when you get any group of people together, you risk problems such as groupthink and diffusion of responsibility. But arguably, those are issues rooted in human psychology. It’s just easier to blame branding and corporate logos than it is to take a hard look at ourselves.

. . . All right, that was probably more legal/psychological theory than you needed. Still with me? Awesome.

2. I Graduated

The second thing that happened was that I graduated into an oversaturated, highly competitive legal market. It was brutal. In the year that I applied for internships, all the major firms culled their staff. The interns that year were slaughtered. They’d worked their asses off and gone through a hideous selection process with the promise that one in three of them would get a job. When that number turned out to be a joke, well . . . hell hath no fury like a law student scorned.

As for my competition, picture one of those people who get blindingly high GPAs, already works part-time in the industry, wins competitions and still somehow finds the time to volunteer, while simultaneously being so goddamn nice that it’s impossible to hate them. Well, in my year, it wasn’t just that one guy or girl. It felt like I was surrounded by them.

So, like the neurotic, anxiety-ridden law student I was, I researched. I optimized my CV, gambled on my cover letters, and attended a lot of seminars. One of them was on the job application process, and it was taught by a scarily enthusiastic lady who had about three slides devoted to Personal Branding. For those of you who haven’t come across that ridiculously sales-y term, it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s treating yourself as a product and trying to figure out how to “market” that to potential employers.

Needless to say, at one point in the seminar she paused dramatically and said, “You have to sell yourself.”

Dissolution was born of all of these things and more. So as you can see, I’ve got a lot of people to thank. Aside from Dr. Windholz, I have to thank the friends who stayed up with me until 2am eating shitty pancakes and helping me workshop the book title.

I have to thank everyone who read the book and gave me their honest feedback.

I have to thank my long-suffering partner for, well, everything.

I have to thank my readers, who took a chance on me (seriously, thank you).

And I have to thank the lady (sorry, I’ve forgotten your name) who took her job so damn seriously that she told us to sell ourselves.

You can read spoiler-free, honest reviews of Dissolution and get links to the Amazon store at The Literature Hub (review) (shop) and Jimbo’s Awesome SFF Reviews.

I have a history of mental illness in my family. I consider myself fortunate that it only gave me depression when I was thirteen (the year of dealing with compulsory shit, apparently). However, it’s left a permanent squatter inside my head. A voice that I’m sure many of you are (sadly) familiar with.

One day while I was staring at a blank page and the voice in my head seemed incredibly loud, I found myself writing. Anything to drown it out. Anything.

This series has helped me a little. So I thought I might share it.

Just in case.

11 August 2015

Dear Lee,

You are not going crazy.

This is life right now. It’s working until 2am in the morning and then feeling empty for a week. It’s coming home and eating dinner and going to sleep and waking up to do it all over again. It’s trying really hard to spend time with family and friends and love, and then peering back at the seconds bleary-eyed, wondering where they went.

You’re tired.

You’re tired, Lee. Tired of making goals and tired of achieving them and then watching them recede into the distance. Time goes too fast. You were never going to catch up.

And it’s okay.

It’s okay to stop running, for a bit.

You’ve got what you wanted. A shot at the job of your dreams. You’ve done your best. That’s all you can do. Now’s the time to curl up and consolidate. To remember what beauty tastes like. To imagine again. To wonder. To write worlds into being.

So read, damn it. Read. Not just old, familiar, comforting things (although these are good for you too, like hot soup). Read something new. Remember what it’s like to discover a story for the first time, that moment it sinks its jaws in and pulls you along for the ride.

Yes. Read. Imagine. Dream. And slowly come back to life.

Love,

Lee.

I want to say that when I was young, I loved fairytales. But that would be a lie. Love is not the right word. I was obsessed with them. I enjoyed Disney well enough, but what I craved most was eating through Hans Christian Andersen and Aesop and then digging back even further to the older versions that haunted me.  In these stories, fathers sold their daughters to the devil and chopped their hands off when they refused to sleep with them. In these stories, evil queens danced in red hot shoes until they died. In these stories, mermaids walked on land as if knives were stabbing into their feet, and when they refused to kill the ones they loved they became seafoam.

So I think it’s fair to say that Division came from a childhood devouring dark fairytales, an adulthood discovering the joys of science fiction, and the dream, always, of making up stories and sharing them. But I didn’t want to just do Cinderella in space. Most if not all of the popular fairytales have been reimagined countless times in beautiful, haunting ways (I recommend Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman and Deerskin by Robin Mckinley, just to name a few). What I wanted to do was recapture some of the patterns and questions and ambiguity within the darkness. Why is it that Baba Yaga, who literally eats children, is the one who gives Vasilisa the gift of life and fire? What does it say about the society she was born within that Little Red Riding Hood innocently eats her dead grandmother, gets in bed with the Wolf, and then a crow croaks “Slut” at her before she’s eaten alive? For that matter, how interesting is it that fairytales evolve over time, until the actual mothers are all sweetly and innocently dead and have been replaced by wicked stepmothers?

Hans Christian Andersen – Die Prinzessin und der Schweinehirt Illustriert von Heinrich Lefler-Wien,_1897 (Wikimedia Commons)

I have been asked why I called this book a collection of science fiction fairytales. This is why: I believe that when fairytales were first dreamed up over a fire and passed to each other from mouth to mouth, magic was the way that people made sense of the strange and sometimes cruel world around them. So magic was the challenge and the wonder they thrust their protagonists into, to see what they and their society were made of. And so fairytales became the way to pass down lessons and warnings they could whisper to their children and entertain the adults over cold nights.

But what about now? Well, if advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, I think it’s clear. We live in a time where we are a click and an internet connection away from a pool of knowledge vaster than all of the ancient libraries combined. We live in a time shaped by the constant fear of the apocalypse: whether it be through climate change, global epidemics or through our own creation of artificial intelligence. As such, today’s fairytales must be shaped by the shadows of technology and the apocalypse and how we deal and react to them.

Here’s a closer look at how I tried to play this out in Division:

Of course, as my first published book, there are a lot of people to thank, including my amazing beta readers, my literary idols who inspired me to write, the NaNoWriMo Facebook group for their support and the soon-to-be Dr. Aaron Mitchell Brice, my friend and science advisor. And last but most definitely not the least: my family, friends, and readers. Thank you.

Between the ages of around four to fourteen, I pretty much read anything within a ten-metre radius that had pages and a spine. I read trashy spy thrillers next to Lord of the Rings and then jumped straight into non-fiction survival handbooks and guidebooks about spiders. I chewed through the Belgariad and the Mallorean in weeks and it became a point of pride with me that when a new Harry Potter book came out, I’d sleepwalk through a day of school and homework just for those magic moments where I could eat it up in the early hours of the morning. In short, I never understood those people who bemoaned their lack of time to read books.

Until I became one of them.

At some twist in the undefinable path of growing up, my reading slowed. I had to force myself through the books assigned to us in high school, the ones that somehow seemed especially selected to eradicate 99% of the students’ urges to ever read a book again. Then I hit university and started reading for my law degree and my arts majors and minors in international studies, politics and history. I discovered the joys of fandom and dove tirelessly into finding the 5% of amazing fanfiction out there. But other than that, I essentially stopped reading books. For years.

Unread books piled up in my bookshelves. After all, friends and family who knew me best for my near-magical ability to read on the go without crashing into obstacles still thought I was reading. I got books for birthdays, books for Christmases, books when I was sick, books when I was recovering from surgery. I occasionally broke free of whatever demon was tangling with me and finished one, but it was a rarity. In general, I faced an odd sort of hopeless dread when I looked at the books on my to-read list, one that increased in proportion to the width of their spines. Books over four hundred pages suddenly seemed too long. Too ponderous. I had no patience left for ten chapters of beautiful writing where the protagonist mused about his or her place in the universe. Or even for five chapters of essential world building. I just… had no time.

That’s not to say I stopped reading. For me, that would be like stopping breathing. No – instead of reading books, I retreated to the comfort of short stories and fanfiction where I knew the worlds and could sift through thousands of stories online, looking for one that would give me wings.

But no books.

Slowly, I started to hate myself. How could I not be reading books? Something that was so core to my identity? Why was it so bloody difficult to bring myself to pick one up? My neck started curving. I felt like I was carrying an invisible book around with me on a chain. Or rather, all the books on my earnest to-read list that I knew would never be opened. I was hauling around a library by the time I finally sat down and forced myself to confront what was going on.

And like most things, it ended up being both frustratingly simple and annoyingly complex.

1. Time (and Trust)

Everyone always talks about having no time to read. For some that’s true, but I think for most of us it’s not. What we’re really saying when we say we have no time to read is that we’ve decided other things are more important to us than reading. After all, I had weekends to dive into fanfic and early mornings to snack on short stories and articles. So it wasn’t time per se. It was my mind unconsciously analysing the economic return without my consent and rejecting it as too risky.

I mean let’s face it. Committing to a book or a series is almost like committing to a relationship. You’re giving a collection of words hours, perhaps even days or weeks of your limited lifespan in the hope that the end result will be magical.

So that means when you’re forced into a string of uncomfortable arranged marriages with books that are clearly not the right one for you, like I’d wager most of us had to suffer through at school, you start to get a little relationship-shy. Why invest all that time when experience has told you recently that all you’ll get is a faceful of bleary-eyed regret? And maybe awkward moments down the track, like spotting a crazy ex at the bookstore?

You can even become jaded enough to start having affairs, based on the promise that there’s a better book out there. And when it turns out to be just like the other ones, you move on disappointed and – depending on how good the blurb, the marketing or the recommendation was – feeling slightly betrayed.

2. Pressure

The second factor was more insidious. I had a lot of amazing conversations at university and at work with super-intelligent people whom I respected who would recommend me books. I would read articles about classics that I HAD to read, and then would find myself struggling unhappily through dense walls of text about characters I intensely disliked. I felt a lot of pressure in my limited time to only read books that I suppose would Improve my Character, Boost My Intelligence and Allow Me to Smugly Tell Other People I had Also Read These Famous Books and We Could Bond Over Them While Privately Hating Every Page.

This stopped when a new book subscription service I’d first signed up to in order to read through its catalogue of classics glitched, leaving only the titles of the books. At the time, I was looking for a tensely written thriller that I could study to feed my muse while I worked on my science fiction novella Dissolution. I found something with a promising title and dove in.

I realised about ten pages in that I was reading an amazingly trashy romance-spy book.

I hesitated for a moment, and then devoured the rest of it in about three hours.

It was Terrible. It was Not Enlightening. But it was Damn Enjoyable. And suddenly, a concept I’d stumbled across previously reared its beautiful head.

The Hell Yeah / Fuck Yes or No! Concept

The dual titling of this concept depends on whether you’re looking at the original article by investor / entrepreneur Derek Silvers or its further application to deciding on relationships by advice guru / entrepreneur Mark Manson. Or how much you like to swear. But fundamentally, the concept boils down to this: we all have limited time on this earth, so if we’re faced with a choice of whether to do something or not, we should ask ourselves the following:

Does this make me go [Hell Yeah! / Fuck Yes!]?

If not, don’t do it.

Or in my case, don’t read it.

I started trying to apply this to books and the result was immediate relief from a huge pressure I’d mostly invented inside my head. It was fantastic. I had a formula now for my decision-making. I was able to nose a few chapters into a book, ask myself how I was feeling, and then put it down.

As groundbreaking as this was to me, I felt immediately cautious. I didn’t want to lose touch with books that would challenge me simply because I had an easy excuse. I had to separate out boredom or indifference from the terror of the new or confronting. So it became a two part test:

It’s not perfect, I know. It’s not even much – just a tiny shift in perspective (and a recognition that I can’t code), realising that it’s not necessarily the book’s or my fault, it’s just that I might not be the target market. But still, even just figuring out the above and finally pushing myself to read some rare classics that actually spoke to me such as Fahrenheit 451 and Slaughterhouse V allowed me to commit to reading again for good.

And it’s been incredible.

I’ve been on and off since then – reading nothing in a month, and then three books in the next. It depends on how many books I stumble across that give me that “Hell yeah!” feeling in the first few chapters. But I know I’m also lucky that I’ve found chunks of time I can dedicate to reading. A few minutes at lunch. The bus ride back home after a day of work. They’re not the same for everyone. A friend of mine cuddles up to her books when she goes to bed and will read a few minutes before she goes to sleep, and in this way manages to get through a book every few months. Another reads books in the morning on the weekends when she doesn’t want to get up. Whatever works.

It’s worth it. I’m reading again. Perhaps not with the joyous, unrestrained vigour with which I devoured books when I was young, but it’s a start. And even though my to-read list is still a virtual library, the weight feels lighter somehow. A little closer to joy.

Now excuse me. I’m off to read amazing fanfiction and maybe dip my toe cautiously into a book.

Eight months ago, I bought tickets to see the rock star of the literary world.

I was first introduced to Neil Gaiman’s writing by my older brother. It was one of many gifts he passed on to me during childhood: a love of story and character-driven computer games, an introduction into the fantastical world of anime, and a single volume of comics. That volume was The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes.

I opened it oblivious to the danger within. If I had been in a horror movie, I would have been the teenager innocently wandering into the attic at midnight to check out who was playing that hauntingly beautiful music. In real life, I turned a page and fell into the world of Dream and his Endless siblings – a world teeming with gods and monsters that I recognised and spirits and serial killers that I didn’t.  Not that it mattered which was which: by the last page the stories had grown hooks and lodged themselves in me, past muscle and bone. And if I had to put my finger on Gaiman’s magic, that’s where I’d place it. Beyond the trope-twisting and humour, Gaiman’s strongest pieces haunt you.

Which is why, over a decade later, I found myself sitting at the back of a theatre waiting for Neil to gift me with new ghosts.

If understatement was a crime, I’d be guilty if I said the theatre was crowded. I still remember it took me a good six minutes to manoeuvre the short distance from the front doors through the red-carpeted hallway and then to the back row where I’d managed to book a seat. It was impossible to miss the heady excitement hanging in the air on the way. Everywhere I looked, smiles beamed from different faces. Old women with pink streaks in their hair. Young skinny guys clutching the hands of their girlfriends or sisters. White, brown, black, yellow. All of us drawn into the centre of the web where a master awaited with his stories.

I sunk into my chair and waited impatiently. When the lights finally dimmed there was a single moment of stillness, and then music began to whisper through the hall. Voices hushed. I craned my neck and saw four shapes in the corner of the stage. The notes spilled from their bows and crept over the air to fill the hall: eerie, breathtaking and evocative. There was something in that music that felt like it was blurring the edges of the world. The theatre existed in a suspended space. When the last notes trailed off and the applause sounded, they’d done their job. Magic was in the air. We were ready to believe in the grotesque, and the beautiful, and the beautifully grotesque.

It was into this charged and quivering atmosphere that a man dressed in black stepped nonchalantly onto the stage. That was enough. The crowd went insane.
And that’s how Neil Gaiman’s show The Truth is a Cave in the Dark Mountains began.

Like many well-known writers before him, Gaiman started off as a journalist. His writing came in standard journalistic forms: interviews, book reviews, a biography, a book of quotes. After he became disillusioned with the way British newspapers regularly passed off made-up fantasy as fact, he threw himself merrily into the business of passing off facts (of life, humanity, the world) as made-up fantasy. And he didn’t just stop at comic books. Since then, he’s written award-winning graphic novels, children’s books, screenplays, poetry, songs, television episodes and more. And that night in a hushed theatre at the bottom of the world, he didn’t disappoint with his range.

Firstly, he introduced us to the musicians who’d so beautifully set the scene for the night: the quartet Fourplay. Then he started off with a story that was real: the Charlie Hebdo massacre. He soaked us in poetry and shared a short story from his new collection Trigger Warning, a heartwrenching ode to his friend Ray Bradbury. He read stories born from Twitter challenges about gambling ducks and a man mad with grief building a sanctuary made of books. Finally, he even sang: a jaunty tune about a psychopathic young boy that had us both laughing and smoothing down goosebumps.

When the first half was over, the mad rush began to get back outside – not to get refreshments or seek relief like in most shows, but to buy the limited stack of signed books sitting outside and a copy of Fourplay’s music. And then run back just in time for the second half, not wanting to miss a second.
Which was fortuitous, because when he started reading his illustrated novella The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, everything changed.

Gaiman has mentioned before that he edits aloud. This is extremely apparent when you go to one of his readings. The words take on another element when he speaks them, so powerful that for weeks afterward, whenever I picked up one of his books I could distinctly hear an echo of his voice, reading the words over my shoulder. As he spoke, Eddie Campbell’s illustrations took a life of their own on a screen suspended above the stage, swimming out of the darkness to seize us with the stories in each line. That, in combination with Fourplay’s hushed atmospherics – the low hum of strings here, the tense sweep of chords there – completed it. It was magical. And horrifying. Not a movie. Not a play. Something different, a new art form that smelled like old campfires but had music and images to push us over the edge.

And push us over the edge they did.

I won’t spoil the award-winning novella for you if you haven’t read it, I’ll just say that its stunning conclusion is even more breathtaking when spoken by its creator. I still remember the rush in the theatre as the last line of the last page of the book was spoken, as we surged to our feet and gave a standing ovation. And I remember thinking that this was it. It had to be. After taking us through a journey dripping with mist, darkness and regret, where else could we go?

But Gaiman still had more gifts for us.

There was a joint interview with Eddie Campbell, the artist behind the haunting illustrations of The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains. Then, to our utter surprise and glee, the enormously talented Amanda Palmer graced us with a guest appearance. The night ended with a glorious mix of music and shattering applause. When the curtains finally fell, the crowd filed slowly out of the theatre and staggered home, each one of us drunk on magic.

                  The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains – Illustration by Eddie Campbell

It’s been a number of months since that night. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out myself and convey to other people why exactly I found the experience of a few hours of stories and music so transformative. After countless drafts, I’ve distilled it down to this. This, here, right now: the four life lessons I learned from Neil Gaiman.

1. COLLABORATE

I’ll admit it. The word ‘collaboration’ puts my teeth on edge. It reminds me of poorly engineered group projects and management buzzwords. It’s overused to the point of meaninglessness.

But actual collaboration – where different minds and strengths and talents come together to create something that transcends the sum of its parts – is marvellous. And I think it’s too often forgotten in today’s fairytales of the lone hero. We speak about Steve Jobs and Richard Branson as individuals, not as leaders of  teams who had to work for years together before they began to see the fruits of their labour. We speak about Elon Musk (rightly) as a visionary revolutionising our world, but we gloss over the exceptional teams he relies upon to shape and deliver that vision.

Yet collaboration is what made The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains sing. There is no doubt that Gaiman himself was a polished, practiced and fantastic entertainer, who could have easily held us under his spell for the evening on his own. But it was the powerful combination of Gaiman, the music of Fourplay, Eddie Campbell’s illustrations, and Amanda Palmer – each an expert in their own field – that made the night truly magical.

I think this is a particularly important lesson because so often, creative and personal pursuits are seen as solitary. Writers are alone, tapping at their keyboards or scrawling in their notepads. Entrepreneurs are alone, working into the dead of night with only a laptop and a source of caffeine. Songwriters and artists are alone, their only companions their software and their instruments. Parents are alone, in a nuclear family and a nuclear society.

But we’re not alone. Or at least, we don’t have to be. And if we join forces, Captain Planet will save us all, we will create something that transcends us.

2. APPROACH CREATION AS BOTH A CHALLENGE AND AS A JOY

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want, at some level, to create.

Whether it’s the creation of music, or words, or a business, or a new technology, or a new life… the urge to both create and consume seem to be bred into our bones. But it’s a lot easier to consume than to create. Especially in this brave new world we’re living in, where for the first time in human history we suffer from a glut of information and entertainment rather than an absolute scarcity. And over time, the more we consume uncritically, the harder it is for us to compare our fledgling efforts with the success stories we read where all the sleepless nights and failures have been either airbrushed out or summarised in an inspirational montage. Then we get terms like Writer’s Block. The Wall. Failure.

Yet the moment Gaiman appeared on stage, you could see the joy etched into him. It was layered in the timbre of his voice, the expressiveness of his reading, and the excitement in his stories. And it was clear that that was the fuel he used to keep himself going. Gaiman has written before about how he gets ideas, and there is a wonderful, joyful, open-minded inquisitiveness to the way he approaches it.

But in between the jokes and readings, he made casual asides about how hard the work was. And about how he kept pushing himself harder. At one point, he told us how he’d planned to write a story an hour based on Twitter challenges. After numerous people told him he was crazy, he relented and shifted the milestones to a story every 2-3 days. In another story, he mentioned how a meeting of like minds led to him collaborating with a group of artists to record 8 songs in 8 hours, recording live and posting to Twitter. They ended up creating 6 songs in 12 hours. You could say that both times, he failed. But considering what he ended up creating (collaboratively!) as a result of those challenges, I think that would be pretty short-sighted.

In the end, I think what I glimpsed from these stories was an insight into how he constantly keeps producing such quality work. Simply put, Gaiman always challenges himself to do more, testing his own limits and creating new boundaries. And most importantly, he approaches this backbreaking work with a joy that shines through his writing and makes it magic.

3. EMBRACE MULTIPLICITY

Here is Gaiman’s short autobiography from Amazon:

I make things up and write them down. Which takes us from comics (like SANDMAN) to novels (like ANANSI BOYS and AMERICAN GODS) to short stories (some are collected in SMOKE AND MIRRORS) and to occasionally movies (like Dave McKean’s MIRROR MASK or the NEVERWHERE TV series, or my own short film A SHORT FILM ABOUT JOHN BOLTON). In my spare time I read and sleep and eat and try to keep the blog at www.neilgaiman.com more or less up to date.” Please note that the range of creative works listed here fails to include the fact that he’s written television episodes for Dr. Who, several hilarious songs and gorgeous poems, and that his work with Terry Pratchett has been turned into a radio show.

I love this, because our brains are biologically wired to categorise ourselves and the world. Sometimes those categories are great; I don’t exactly want someone who specialises in patisserie deciding overnight (without any other background) that their skill with a piping set means they can perform emergency cardiac surgery. But other times, those categories limit us by drawing boundaries around our identity that we think we can’t cross.

But Gaiman’s catalogue merrily tears down these boundaries and sets them on fire. One can see from the myriad of titles and forms that his drive is to just keep creating, in any format: whatever suits the story best or will let it see the light of day.

And that’s enough to make me want to try harder as well. To push out of my comfort zone of short stories into novellas. To hopefully push out of the zone of novellas into novels. To try learning new instruments and new skills and to keep breaking boundaries.

To master what Gaiman is a master of: fear.

4. FEAR SHOULD NOT BE IGNORED – IT SHOULD BE ALCHEMISED.

Gaiman writes horror. It’s an integral part of most of his stories. He writes about witches who eat the hearts of stars to become young again. A twisted god living in a small American town who sacrifices his favourite children every year to keep it prosperous. A monster called the ‘Other Mother’ who just wants to love us to death and replace our eyes with buttons.

And as horrifying as it all is – Gaiman doesn’t flinch away. He takes things that we know to be true – the consequences of greed, the fallout of arrogance and selfishness – and shapes them into monsters that deep down are frightening because we recognise them in our everyday lives.

What sort of monsters? Well, I don’t know what you’re afraid of, but I know you’re afraid of something. After all, I’m afraid. I’m afraid that a nuclear holocaust is even more likely now than it ever was in the Cold War. I’m afraid of my loved ones walking out the door and into a car crash, gone in a second that I have no control over. I’m afraid of dying without achieving my dreams. I’m afraid of climate change and the rise of artificial intelligence. I’m afraid because governments and political groups alike are engaging in terrorism because people blinded with fear and anger tend not to ask questions. And I’m afraid of ourselves – because I know that both mass rage and mass indifference kills, and right now I’m seeing both playing out on the global stage.

So I’m afraid. And to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, in a world like this it is fiercely comforting to have a writer who takes our hand, walks us through the darkness, shows us the monster, and says: “Look, this can be beaten. Here’s the sword.”

Illustration by Chris Riddell

So slay your fear, or make friends with it. Create with joy and without limitations. Collaborate. These are the life lessons I’ve learned from Neil Gaiman. And I can’t wait to read his next work and learn more.