Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer’s 5-date West Coast tour starts in L.A. on October 31. Their coming has already been heralded in social media by the raising of $133,341 on Kickstarter from people who have prepaid to download a digital recording of the event and to receive other goodies.

we’ll have a piano, a ukulele, and maybe some other weird instruments, as well as some unpublished and uncollected Neil Gaiman stories and poems. we’ll both probably switch up what we’re presenting from night to night. we’ll be taking questions from the audience, chat-style, and trying to do special things in each venue, busting out a few surprises, and more or less trying to feel like we’ve connected with you, the people we love and usually only get to talk to directly on twitter & blog-land.

The L.A. Times profiled their marriage in the October 26 edition:

“This was meant to be us doing a gentle road trip, having a chance to be together,” Gaiman says. “We love each other, and the nature of our lives right now is that we are apart as much as we are together. So it seemed like a glorious excuse, working and also having a holiday in each other’s company.”

And Palmer describes their marriage like this:

“I realized one of the deal sealers with Neil in the early days was that he was absolutely willing to have a relationship that didn’t look like any other relationship,” she says. “And so was I. I looked at his life and his situation and his job and my job and who we are and what we value and what we do, and we both said, ‘Whoa, whatever we figure out and whatever we decide to do, it’s not going to be like anything people would even understand.’ To this day we struggle with space and time and attention and energy. But every couple does. So I never think of us as special.”

Besides, the free-spirited, outspoken Palmer — who’s raised eyebrows for lyrics about a victim of date rape having an abortion, not to mention for her own unusually plucked brows — would never fit into traditional matrimony. Gaiman had already tried that route.

“I actually feel like myself, instead of some bizarre pod version of a wife,” she says. “I look at people who hold that 9-to-5 and see each other every night, and I go, ‘Wow, I would kill that person.'”

I noticed that the early commenters on the article weren’t big fans of Amanda Palmer and/or the marriage. Regrettably, every LA Times article collects these social barnacles. I am pleased to see an editor has since come along and scraped off the most offensive.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]