By Janice Tay, Correspondent

THIS story finally ends this weekend because Neil Gaiman will be here for the Singapore Writers Festival.

Are introductions in order? Neil Gaiman: fantasy author of comics, novels, short stories, film scripts and children's books. One of his more recent works, The Graveyard Book, has spent 54 weeks on the children's bestseller list of the New York Times, though everyone I know who loves it is old enough to drive.

A re-imagining of The Jungle Book, it may become one of those works you keep measuring yourself against, like standing beside a mark scratched on a wall to show how tall you were at nine, because you want to see how much you've grown.

There was only one problem: All the tickets for the three events at the festival were gone even before I found out when the release date was. To accommodate the demand, the organisers increased the venue capacity and announced that they would release a 'VERY VERY LIMITED number of tickets' on Sept 26.

I began to see visions of queues. There's one thing I've not mentioned about Gaiman. Yes, he's versatile, yes, he's prolific and yes, he keeps winning awards but what he really is, is a queue-maker (like a rain dancer but more horizontal). The mere hint of his presence is enough to draw previously unconnected people out of great masses of humanity and assemble them into a line.

This happens all over the world and I knew it would happen on Sept 26 at The Arts House. The question was, how early would I have to turn up before the distribution time of 11am if I wanted to be sure of a pair of those VERY VERY LIMITED tickets?

It was almost 9.30am when I hurtled out of my taxi and to the venue. Two girls were approaching. '...queueing since 6.40!' said one of them as she went past.

I stopped. What if the line had reached such epic proportions that those two had given up? I kept on hurtling. Even if I didn't get the tickets, there might be a story in it. To be a writer is to slink up to life with a scavenger's optimism.

The queue had already snaked out of the portico and the person at the head of it said she had been there since 6.40am. She beamed at me, her smile and light green tudung unwilted despite the heat.

Humbled, I went to do some proper queueing. A conversation started up around me and we reminisced about the legendary lines of Singapore. But one girl was from the Philippines and knew nothing about the Great Hello Kitty Scuffles of 2000, so we told her.

In January of that year, McDonald's launched a promotion offering customers Hello Kitty toys with each Extra Value Meal they bought. Lines sprang up, tempers grew short, fights broke out and people were arrested. At one outlet, a glass door broke against the press of the crowd, injuring seven people.

A queue works like a social microcosm. In one line, you are told what a society values, how much trust there is in the system to provide it and whether people will resist the urge to jump the queue.

Almost 10 years on from the Hello Kitty Scuffles, how was Singapore doing? The line that Saturday morning presented the country as orderly and international.

But the nature of the queue might have had something to do with the fact that it was there for Gaiman. For a start, more people were reading than fiddling with their phones. Still, there was no guarantee of what would happen if there weren't enough tickets to go round. Some of the books people were holding looked pretty heavy. If the situation took a Hello Kitty turn, things could get ugly.

10.05am - an hour to go and the sun was weighing down. Anybody want to share life stories?

Around me were Kim, a student from the Philippines; Xuemei, a civil servant; Eldred, who draws; Wanida, who works for Apple and had come with a laptop; and Pat, who handles administration at a polytechnic, has five children aged three to 14, takes all of them on holiday, teaches women to give birth and is on the fast track to a medal.

She said that if she got a pair of tickets, one would go to her 13-year-old son, also a Gaiman fan.

'And where is he?' I asked.

'At home,' she said and laughed. 'Sleeping.'

There was a collective intake of breath as we considered the likelihood of our mothers queueing up for Neil Gaiman tickets for us while we stayed in bed. The conversation flowed on, snagging at times on the uneasiness underneath.

Two people ahead in the line stood up and shook out their groundsheet. 'Do you think they're giving up?' someone asked hopefully.

'They came with a mat - they're not going to give up,' someone else growled.

Sure enough, the two rearranged their sheet and sat down again.

People were still arriving. The queue now stretched along the front of the building and onto the grass at the other side.

11am - my queue buddies and I stood up. We paused only to get one another's contact details, then faced forward as if we could see through the bodies to the number of tickets left.

And then I finally reached the table where three stacks of tickets were disappearing fast. Maybe I was sunstroked but I couldn't quite believe it, not even when two tickets were in my (newly tanned) hand. Nearby, a burly man in black was taking a photo of his tickets.

Not everyone was happy, though - about 20 people had to go away empty-handed. Amid the cries of disappointment, one young girl, looking stricken, stayed to plead with the staff. But no one pushed or shouted and the doors stayed unbroken. Perhaps we had come out from under the shadow of Hello Kitty.

I couldn't leave without seeing how it all ended because the conditions that give rise to a queue are also those that create a community: People united in purpose come together, demanding attention through their presence. But there is also envy of those ahead and a gnawing anxiety that you will not get what they will.

The factors are always the same, yet the manner in which similar desires are balanced against competing interests is different each time.

So I stayed because I wanted to see what kind of queue, what kind of community we had made. And when I left at last, I took more than my two tickets away with me.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.