My First Tweetversation with Neil Gaiman

As frequent readers know, I subscribe to Neil Gaiman's Twitter feed. The coolest part about it is that he frequently replies to @neilhimself messages. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, it's like being able to send him 140 character text messages and having the reasonable assumption that he's actually reading them, and will occasionally even reply to them. The problem is, of course, having something worth actually sending him in 140 characters or less, and then having that something warrant a response from him in his busy day.

Yesterday, I was reading his blog, specifically the post "Death, Tentacles, and Pip", in which he states the following:

The Newbery Award for The Graveyard Book continues to do good things. Bookshops are getting their copies with the gold medal on the cover, it's selling like (I'd say hot cakes, but I've honestly never seen people going "are these cakes hot? Then I will buy all of them!" in real life)

I had never encountered some one who believed that idiom referred to "hot cakes", meaning actual cakes fresh out of the oven, as opposed to "hotcakes" as in the breakfast you get at McDonald's.

So I went to Twitter and posted this:

@neilhimself "hotcakes" are pancakes, silly. Still, not sure why they sell quickly.

Then I logged off. Left work. And never had time to get back online last night. This morning, I check Twitter and see that 16 hours ago, he actually replied!

@experimentfarm when they get cold are they cold hotcakes or have they now become coldcakes?

I immediately replied:

@neilhimself They become cold hotcakes, of course. Much like jumbo shrimp or plastic glasses.

I have to doubt the tweetversation will progress any further, but still... I am such an enormous geek!