How Neil Gaiman Came To Read My Spectacularly Awful Story

It all happened last week. Neil Gaiman stepped onto the stage of the Fitzgerald Theater amidst raucous applause and began bantering with the host of Wits, John Moe. He  read some fairly funny scripted dialogue (in which he was a realtor selling a magical home to a young couple), then did an interview (mostly about The Ocean at the End of the Lane), and finally moved into the main event (well…for me, anyway)…

John Moe began, “Hundreds of you submitted truly horrible, wretched Neil Gaiman stories…couldn’t read more than a few at a time before I had to get up and walk around the room a little bit.”

Neil Gaiman responded, “You should be ashamed of yourselves.” Then, he began reading the five horrible little stories that “won” the Bad Gaiman Challenge.

The first story was mine.

Maybe “won” isn’t the right word. After all, the contest was all about impersonating Neil Gaiman’s writing style…and doing it really badly. It involved coming up with the absolute worst piece of short literature bunk that one could spew into existence. Somehow, I managed to pen a short story so terrible that it drifted to the pile of god-awful, putrid, ill-conceived submissions and was chosen by the staff at Wits to be read by Neil Gaiman.

I should not be as proud of this accomplishment as I am.

What does it prove, after all? I guess it shows my prowess at copying a writer’s style and reworking it into an exaggerated, truly awful form. This is surely a skill that I will use on the daily from here on out…right?

Anyway, even if this writing contest was the strangest thing I have ever entered, I was still tickled at being chosen. Tickled, that is, until one of the staff members at Wits copied a word in my story incorrectly and made Mr. Gaiman stumble as he read, “…had ticked in his waistcoat…possibly tucked? It says ticked here.” Wherein John Moe rejoined, “It’s bad on many levels.”

Oh dear. My bad story was made worse by some incompetent intern [Edit: The Senior Producer of Wits contacted me and told me she made the typing error. Sorry, intern, for the unfounded blame!] who was unable to copy and paste my words onto Mr. Gaiman’s note cards. (And yes, I did go back and check that I had actually written “tucked” and not “ticked”).

So, my 15 seconds of fame quickly fizzled and everyone else moved on with their lives as I obsessed over the mistaken word that Neil Gaiman, THE Neil Gaiman, read from my story. If I ever meet Mr. Gaiman I will most likely ask him if he remembers the Bad Gaiman Challenge and the story he read about a tiny poker game and lactating she-boars and a town called Mug-Wumpton…

…and he will most likely say no.

I wouldn’t blame him. Such hideous prose should be scratched out of anyone’s memory (let alone someone who is paid to write good prose). In any case, my story is immortalized in a Wits podcast, which you can find here at minute 23:15:

http://www.witsradio.org/episodes/gaiman-diamond/

[Edit: There’s also a video! Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cK-8jnub5Q]

For those of you who would like to see the written version of this ugly, little tale, here it is:

The world’s tiniest poker game took place on the head of a pin. All the usual suspects were invited: Marv the unicorn, Cornelius the animate skeleton, Wasp the pig, and Henrietta the imp. I stumbled upon the game when I was travelling to my grandmother’s house in Mug-Wumpton—jabbed my foot right into the pin and caused Wasp the pig to spill the extra aces he kept tucked in his waistcoat. It probably wouldn’t have happened if the sky over Mug-Wumpton wasn’t a sickly purple that day. But the sky rats were out and the she-boars were lactating, so the sky changed and the pin was stepped on and poor Wasp the pig was never invited to another poker game again.

Yes, a truly awful little story, but I will never forget the sound of Neil Gaiman’s voice as he read it and John Moe’s response afterwards: “Yeah, that’s bad.”

[To check out my not-quite-so-terrible prose, please visit www.KateBitters.com]