Fortunately, the Milk . . .: Neil Gaiman

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Fortunately this smirk had a half-life of about one and a half seconds. The loss of smirk corresponded to the rise in volume of clanking footfalls.

Update: The fourth grade kids are now Grade 8 students (that is unbelievable enough - they must have opened that door that let in the time-space-continuum!), and they still refer to the time when I read "Fortunately the milk..." aloud to the class. I would say that is the best praise a children's book can get. "Then the milk touches the milk" has become an insider saying! Either the universe will end, or we will be watching the madness of dwarves with flower pots go on for a while still. Maybe what I wanted from this story was more development, maybe (like everything with Gaiman) I have this grand idea of what he "should" write, I can't appreciate what he actually writes. I opened the door. “Don’t do that,” said a green, globby person. “You’ll let the space-time continuum in." This book is an absolute feast for the imagination. You follow Dad on his ludicrous tale as he explains to his children why he took so long fetching milk from the shop. It is brimming with joy and silliness. It has good characters. The dad is a funny dad. I also like the brother and sister because they are not stupid. They ask the dad clever questions to try and trap him, but he is good at wiggling out of trouble.You've said you wrote Fortunately, the Milk to "redeem" fathers (our word, not yours) after The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. Did you sit down to write a story for fathers? Or did you have the idea for Milk and then think, "Aha! This could be a story to make amends to fathers after Goldfish"? I returned to the bus-stop which which was covered, unfortunately the covering did not seem to be designed to keep the rain off, rather to concentrate the droplets and deposit them upon the head of a waiting passenger. I was soon joined by another hopeful passenger, an old lady who smelt of wet cardboard and boiled sweets. I left in a huff and a grumble, mumbling things about prescription lenses and Vampire Weekend being a good band anyway. If the same object from two different times touches itself, one of two things will happen. Either the Universe will cease to exist. Or three remarkable dwarfs will dance through the streets with flowerpots on their heads.”

I think I should try and pay more attention to my creative process because I'm genuinely not sure at which point I decided I was going to write a riposte to The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and it would be called Fortunately, the Milk and it would be about dads. But I do think that the years of looking at The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and going, "this is not--and it's not even not positive--it's not a good thing for parents," and "I should do something which at least shows the other side of the coin." I suspect that sitting in my head for many years was the starting point. No it's a Neil book, not a Neal book," I yelled as a group of knights in armour clanked out of the darkness and seized the shrunken man and I.Probably my own personal belief that I don't get to see everything going on all the time. And the more you study anything, the more you realize there are huge unseen worlds going on at any point, whether you're reading books about quantum physics, where you learn that actually, more or less, we are all a bunch of hypothetical particles with an awful lot of space between us, or whether it's studying Henry Mayhew and London labor and the London poor and realizing all of these strange, secret worlds that would've been completely invisible to somebody navigating the streets of London. All worlds are 50% unseen.