Lunch With Neil

Kate Burall & Pete Lenz posted the URL of their “Lunch With Neil” along with the background story to alt.fan.neil-gaiman:

I had ordered 2 copies of the leather-bound-limited-edition of Neil’s “Angels and Visitations” (great book, by the way) from DreamHaven (hi, guys!). I waited with great anticipation. Time went by…no books. So I called DreamHaven. The reply was there was delay at the binders because of the low print numbers, so bigger orders were pushing A&V back. So I waited some more. Still no books. So I called again.

DreamHaven was very apologetic, but there wasn’t much they could do about the bindery delay, so they asked what they could do for me in the mean time. My reply was “OK, how about lunch with Neil?” The laughter in the background told me I was on a speaker phone. The answer was “I’ll see what I can do.” Thinking it was just a joke, I was surprised by a box in the mail. It was too odd shaped to be the books, so I opened it carefully. There was a Green Giant can of Nibblets signed by Neil with a drawing of Sandman. The note read “Here’s lunch with Neil”. It sits on the shelf with the statues, and other Sandman collectables.

We mentioned the can on the newsgroup before and found SquidBoy, who had been lucky enough to be on tour with Neil and Dave, and unlucky enough to find something to satisfy a long-distance lunch with Neil. So…over to SquidBoy for his side of the story.