Last week I finished the thirty-second book of my Goddard career, a 588-page adventure-story cum inquest into the development of American spirituality entitled American Gods. I’m going to post my annotation of it probably tomorrow or next week, but I don’t want to talk about that now. What I want to talk about is that, while doing some research for the annotation, I came across the website of the author, Neil Gaiman, a website which contains, among other things, a blog.

Now, I’ve just a read a book by the guy, a book which I dug, and I plan on reading at least one more book by him before I die. He’s a good writer and he has interesting things to say. Those two qualities don’t often show up in the same author (and if you don’t think that scares the shit out of me as an aspiring novelist, you’re crazy). Those are also the two qualities I look for in a blog writer. So when I discovered his blog, I did what I do on most sites I like, I subscribed to the RSS feed.

Subscribe to the Fluid Imagination Feed!

Like millions of Mac users, I use NetNewsWire to manage my web feeds. NNW has a little sidebar that lets you group your subscriptions into various folders. Over the years, I’ve added and subtracted to number of feeds I follow, but about a month ago, I selected them all, deleted, and began anew. So right now, I track 29 feeds that I’ve grouped into six categories:

1. Friends
2. Design
3. Mac
4. Lifehacking
5. News
6. Entertainment

I also have two feeds that are unorganized. The first tracks any new job opening at Green Mountain College. I follow that because…you never know. The other is Waxy.org. I stumbled across the site earlier this month and discovered its author recently made the move to full-time blogging. I read his post about the process, liked it, and figured I’d read along for a while, see what develops.

The question I had when I subscribed to Neil Gaiman’s blog though was, where do I put him? The Waxy.org one has been left uncategorized because I’ve barely read the thing, and any day now, I might say to myself, “Bah,” and delete the feed.

Gaiman’s feed won’t be like that. I’ve read 588 pages of the guy’s work, and I trust him to keep me interested, if not everyday, then at least a few times a month.

But where to put him?

There are three possible answers as I see it. First, I could do the no-brainer thing and create a new category for him. Call it Books or something. Then I could add any other author blogs I come across, or even subscribe to the feed of the NYT book review, and all the other book-related websites out there (my favorite web-site title: Blog of a Book Slut).

I could also file Gaiman’s feed under Entertainment. It’s a pretty broad word and it no doubt applies to books and book-related things. But right now, the only feeds in Entertainment are Rolling Stone’s music and movie reviews, my Netflix queue, and Netflix’s new releases. I just can’t see his blog fitting in with that.

The third option is, I think, the best one. I’ll file him under Friends.

Because isn’t that the way it is with authors you like? Aren’t they, in some meaningful way, your friends? Think about it. Have you ever given any of your real friends the hours upon hours upon hours of undivided attention that you’ve given to some authors? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that books are better friends than real people. But you can’t deny that they are, in some meaningful way, friends indeed.

So that’s where I’ve put him.

Now if only he’ll lend me some money.