"I am?" I said. "Will they be real copies or just tasters?" And she thought it was funny that I didn't know, and I found it rather funny too, and we went on to do an enjoyable interview. So it looks like there will be advance copies of Wolves in the Walls at Book Expo America at the end of May, and I'll have to decide what I'm going to draw in them. I've got to the point where I can do a Coraline rat pretty fast, but I'm not sure I'll ever be able to draw wolves at speed. Maybe a jam-pot. There are jam-pots in Wolves after all. I bet I could draw jam-pots like nobody's business.
Wolves by the way isn't a new novel, as I've seen it mistakenly listed. It's a graphic novel/picture book, 62 pages of my words and Dave McKean's pictures, for kids of all ages. It's not a sequel to The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish although it shares a character. Sort of. This is the cover, from Bloomsbury's site.
Anyway. A long day over.
Before I came to Portugal, I thought that what Brazilians spoke was Portuguese and sounded Portuguese. I was wrong, I've now realised. It sounds Brazilian. Portuguese people talking Portuguese sound as if they're talking Russian.
Right.
A "which layer of Dante's Hell do you belong in?" test just arrived in my in-box from Jonathan Carroll, who no longer keeps up the White Apples journal, over at http://www.whiteapples.com/journal.html, but there's lots of cool new material from Jonathan over at his own jonathancarroll.com website (for which, incidentally, I did the introduction).
Lots of really nice, and several really touching e-mails coming in, via the FAQ line, or through Julia Bannon, from people who found that their sites started getting serious hits after being mentioned here.
I really need more time on my hands, or more of you to suggest strange-but-cool web places. Nothing exciting to report right now, except I was heartbroken to discover that Twinkies contain real food and will not last forever.
And I should mention that, of all the unlikely places I've been, Sintra is one of them.