Not sure of the logic of doing a signing in a public library forty minutes away from the convention (if the directions work. 70 minutes if they don't.) (Ours didn't.) I think the rather odd choice of a location has something to do with the Evanston library having really good press contacts, which they must not have bothered to use. Anyway, I signed for about a hundred people, which meant that most of the other authors in the room, who did not have a hundred people there for them, (a) cheerfully hated me and (b) knocked off after twenty minutes and went and did something more sensible instead. And I just signed for an hour or two.
Tomorrow morning I have a reading and Q&A, immediately followed by Gahan Wilson interviewing me. I'll be doing other stuff through the con, on Saturday and Sunday, but it's things like interviewing Gene Wolfe, so I'm dead puzzled why both of the events with me as the focus are within a three hour period early on a Friday. I suppose the people doing the programming thought it would be tidier like that.
After the signing Jill Thompson and her husband, Brian Azzarello, took me out for wonderful sushi at a restaurant called Katsu (2651 W. Peterson Ave, Chicago 60659) for sushi that was really world class, and I was impressed, and we all ate too much. ("You must eat last piece sushi," said the hostess. "Is lucky." And we looked at her like Mr Creosote in The Meaning of Life, being offered his wafferthin mint. "Maybe one of you need some luck?") Jill and I both talked too much, and Brian mostly listened, and smiled in all the right places.
And goodnight.