This is just a very short , very late-at-night post to say that I attended the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and I enjoyed myself, and I did my solo event and the other one with Ian Rankin, and they were both delightful. The signings were amazingly efficiently run, and the one-item-per-person rule was on the one hand, cruel, and on the other hand meant that on the first day I signed for 500 people in 3 hours.
It's strange being somewhere with someone, and stranger being somewhere with someone who is working a lot of the time. I'm way behind on my email, and will go off the radar in a few days to just go off and write and walk and rest and recover.
Sad news: my cat Pod died, in her sleep, of old age yesterday. Lorraine blogs about it here. Pod was a bit mad, but she loved Lorraine (which is good). Right now I find I'm more worried about Hermione, her sister, alone in the library...
Tomorrow it's Amanda's Edinburgh gig. Then on Monday she'll be trailing after me for a couple of days while I go and check out locations and suchlike.
And I want to say thank you to Gordon Lee for bearing up so well and hanging in there. It's hard for the people who think that the authorities are out to get them. It must be much harder when the authorities really are out to get you.
As I said when I made the announcement, the CBLDF has spent over $100,000 to make sure that this attempted miscarriage of justice didn't happen, all of that money raised a dollar at a time from fans and readers and professionals. So two nights ago we had an event for publishers, the kind who publish books (and who are now publishing graphic novels), in order to spread the idea that a) they needed to know what the CBLDF is -- they may need us, and b) we'd like them to take out corporate memberships.
The CBLDF reading tonight was fun, and Bill Hader is hilarious. (His impression of me listening to Al Pacino pitching his interpretation of the Sandman movie would have been worth the price of admission, if I'd paid to get in, which I hadn't.) ...
Last week, Sharon and Bill Stiteler came out and we took advantage of a warm Sunday to go and say hello to the bees, and do the spring inspection (and spring cleaning)of the hive. (We'll be putting in some new hives over the next few weeks.) Sharon blogged about the bee inspection over at
I was fascinated by this, in the way you can only be when you once wrote a book about something (actually I'd finished writing the book when most of this was happening. A small glimpse into what might have been on the sequel to the infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Computer Game... -- http://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/
