Dear Mr. Gaiman,

Recently I’ve been enjoying the benefits of a newfound technology – RSS feeds. There’s no way to remember the trail of links that brought me to your online journal, but I’m quite happy to have found it. In the two months that I’ve been reading, you’ve greatly impressed me in the amount of time you spend communicating with your fans.

One day, as I waited for one of your linked pages to load, my mind wandered. I realized that I was rather jealous of the fans that have, for some small slice of time, captured your attention online. I used the time to reflect on what keeps me coming back to your journal. Was it that your interactions with your fans gives me an alluring glimpse into the life of a celebrity? Probably. Too bad I can never tell Neil Gaiman how his work has affected me, I thought. But, boy, wouldn’t that be cool?

How I managed to miss it for so long I’ll never know, but just then I had a tiny epiphany: Waitaminute…I’m actually reading Neil Gaiman’s responses to his fans’ e-mails. And I’m a fan. Thinking back, it’s embarrassing to admit that I needed a revelation for that to sink in, but it simply never occurred to me that with so many fans, you might actually read a “thank you” letter from me.

Once I realized that there was a chance, I decided to write one.

I have two things to thank you for. The first “thank you” is, I suspect, both easy and common: Thank you for American Gods.
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Last night, as Oksana and I were finishing up dinner, we received a call from her niece. She was staying the night with her friend and was just calling to spread some gossip. “Did you hear? The downtown Subway has been burning since 2:30pm!”

When Oksana relayed this news to me, my first thought was, “Wait a minute… Juneau doesn’t have a subway system!” Oh, but yeah… They do have a sandwich shop franchise down there. Well, at least that explained the hazy smoke we’d been seeing all day.

When Oksana hung up the phone, it was still only about 8:30pm and she wanted to go check it out. I thought it might be interesting to see the damage before the results of the inevitable cleanup. I know firsthand how tragic a fire can be, but there’s no denying that there’s a certain allure to observing the scene of an accident.

We grabbed her camera and headed in to town.
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Back in 2002 there was a fire that managed to wipe out everything I had in storage. That was a horrible experience that I wouldn’t wish on anyway, but there was a silver lining – the insurance check pulled me all the way out of eight years of accumulated college and credit card debt.

Oksana and I married a few months later, but it took us quite awhile before we got her INS paperwork sorted out. Eventually, she received her temporary green card and (coincidentally on the same day) was offered a decent-paying job. The intervening six months, where I was the only one working, weren’t that bad. I’d trade having a single-income family over a pile of minimum interest payments any day.

Very quickly the benefits of a dual-income, debt-free, children-absent family were realized. Around our first anniversary in August, after Oksana and I had figured out how to manage our money with (seriously) five bank accounts, we sat down to talk about creating a savings goal for the end of the year. $5,000 seemed attainable.

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