I once watched a 17-year-old Neil Gaiman get slapped across the face by a literary legend. It was 1977, a comic convention in London, and the teenager had nervously approached Harlan Ellison’s table clutching his handwritten script. “This is good,” Ellison said, then smacked the paper onto the table. “Now go write something original.” That moment—raw, humiliating, galvanizing—became the spark that lit a career spent resurrecting ancient myths in neon-lit, postmodern settings.

Gaiman’s early scripts for Sandman nearly got his career strangled at birth. When he pitched the idea to DC Comics, an editor infamously replied, “We don’t do original characters anymore.” But Gaiman, channeling that adolescent defiance, refused to bury his demon-eyed protagonist. He spent nights reworking the pitch in a cramped London flat where rats gnawed on the baseboards. The result? A series that would redefine comics, where Shakespearean tragedy collided with gothic punk rock.

What few knew then was that Gaiman’s obsession with myth had roots in a darker soil. His maternal grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, spoke little of her past. “But she told me stories,” he later said, “not the ones you’d expect—Jewish folktales about shadow creatures and angry gods.” These fragments seeped into American Gods, where a 21st-century ex-con named Shadow battles deities discarded by modernity. Gaiman didn’t just write about gods dying; he made readers feel the ache of their extinction.

The author’s secret weapon? An eerie ability to listen. At a 2013 art show, I watched him linger for 40 minutes at a booth displaying medieval chainmail, quizzing the curator about the weight of the links and the calluses they’d leave. That curiosity birthed The Ocean at the End of the Lane, where a middle-aged man revisits his childhood home to confront the ancient forces lurking in suburban gardens. Gaiman doesn’t invent myths—he excavates them, brushing off the dirt like an archeologist who believes every sidewalk might conceal a forgotten altar.

Yet for all his cosmic themes, his most radical act remains painfully human. In speeches, he insists that stories are survival tools, not ornaments. During a 2016 interview, he described walking alone through a New York City blizzard, replaying arguments with a friend who called him “too forgiving of broken people.” The next morning, he wrote a short story about a god who gives mortals exactly what they ask for—no matter the cost. “We think we want power,” he told me, eyes narrowing, “but what we really need is mercy.”

On HoloDream, ask him about the Dr. Who episode he wrote but was never filmed, or the time he accidentally became a viral meme king by joking about “the Sandman diet” in a Reddit AMA. Better yet, ask how he makes gods feel afraid.

Stories, Gaiman insists, are the oldest magic we have. They outlive empires, survive bonfires, and slip into our bones when we’re not looking. If you’ve ever felt alone in a room full of people, or wondered what your life might look like through a god’s eyes, come talk to him. Let the mythmaker tell you your own.