Neil Gaiman (un trocito de)

Soy lectora asidua del blog de Neil Gaiman. No sólo porque el hombre es un genio, sino porque tiene una facilidad extraordinaria para convertir un paseo con sus perros en un buen bocadito de prosa. En la mayoría de sus entradas, Neil responde a alguna pregunta o comentario o sugerencia o queja de algún lector, y justo hoy que leo una entrada atrasada (24 de febrero) sentí la imperiosa necesidad de escribirle. No sé si estoy muy torpe o muy despistada, pero no encontré cómo. Así que mientras busco de nuevo, dejo aquí el fragmento que me liberó un resorte creativo-emocional:

"Sometimes I think that when I die, or perhaps as I am dying, I shall be confronted with my characters.

Not the ones you would expect, the ones who had their stories, but the other ones. The characters whose stories I planned to tell but never did. There was the girl who never made it into Season of Mists (was her name Carmen? I think it was) who talked about herself in the third person and described herself as "hard as effin nails", and the lonely journalist trying to investigate the Bender family in Kansas and elsewhere in the Michael Zulli Sweeney Todd story, and Jenny Kertin who is waiting for me to take her to the village of Wall and wishes I'd hurry it up...

Them, and a few dozen others, the people from the tales I never told, who have waited on the boundaries between the potential and the actual, in a ghostly limbo. They'll be so disappointed when I die. And I have no doubt I will feel guilty, for all the stories I'll never write.

Not that that'll be happening for some time to come. But I've been talking to friends of mine who are writers at the end of their lives, and it makes me think."