Trading faces

Photo: Sophia Quach

Inspiration comes to some writers spontaneously. For others, it's a protracted process. And then there are those, like Neil Gaiman, for whom both are true. "I either wrote it in two hours or I wrote it in five years," says the best-selling fantasy writer of The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, a delightful children's book he created with illustrator Dave McKean, which is being reissued in a new edition by HarperCollins ($16.99).

Goldfish, a cross between comics storytelling and a conventional kid-lit narrative, was originally published in 1997. By then, Gaiman had achieved prominence as the writer of the acclaimed fantasy comic Sandman (one of his many collaborations with McKean) and was beginning to establish himself as a prose writer. The title precisely summarizes the story: Coveting his friend's goldfish, a young boy trades his father for the pets. When his mom demands that he recover his father, the situation gets thorny. The boy learns that his father has been swapped among his friends for an electric guitar, then a gorilla mask and finally, a rabbit.

The Goldfish story gestated in 1989, Gaiman says, when his now 21-year-old son, Mike, was seven. "I had said something to him that you really shouldn't say to small boys, like, 'Isn't it past your bedtime?'" he recalls. "And he looked up at me, really angry and frustrated, and said, 'I wish I didn't have a dad.' Then he had to stop because he had to figure out what else you could have. And after a while, he said rather desperately, 'I wish I had goldfish,' and then he stomped off to bed. And I stood there thinking, What an amazing, wonderful thing to say. How cool is that?"

Gaiman immediately decided to extrapolate a book from the incident as a gift for his son, but hit a creative wall after a single paragraph. The project lay dormant until 1994, when Gaiman checked in to a Galveston, Texas, motel to work in solitude on the script for a miniseries based on his novel Neverwhere. When he found himself stuck, he started digging through old files on his computer and found the story he'd begun years earlier.

"I realized I knew what the next paragraph was, so I typed it," he explains. "And then I knew what the one after that was. So I sat there and wrote the story out from beginning to end in one sitting."

Gaiman gave the text to McKean, but it took the artist, who was working on his epic 500-page graphic novel Cages, some two-and-a-half years to illustrate it. Once completed, recalls Gaiman, the book "was immediately rejected by every children's publisher out there because it was the wrong size and the wrong shape and it had too many pages."

White Wolf, a publisher of role-playing games, eventually released Goldfish. "They said they were starting a children's-book line, and it would be the first. It was, but it was also the last," Gaiman confides.

Although Gaiman is hopeful that the new edition will reach a wider audience, Goldfish has a solid fan close to home: "It's my little daughter's favorite of all my books," the author says, "and that's reason enough to be glad it's back in print."