Met at airport by Kristal, the publicist from Luitingh, my publishers. Then I bought a cell phone that I can, at least in theory, use across Europe, and I bought shampoo, ditto, then back to the hotel where I did a couple of interviews, very different from each other. Interviews are really fun in the early stages of a tour, as you get to find out what you think about things when you're asked. They only get odd toward the end of the tour, when you find people asking you the same questions and you just give them the same answers. (I sort of hope that moving from country to country will ensure a variety of questions.)
I'm typing this in the hotel's "internet nook" (I'm not only in the same hotel I was in in 1997, but in the same room, which can cause some peculiar moments of temporal drift).
I managed to get the hotel computer to spit out a few of the FAQ questions, but most of the ones I meant to get to are on my notebook computer.
Inquiring minds want to know: what colour combination of Mini did you
order? (I thought the gunmetal grey with a white roof was pretty
snazzy.)
Black. (I was a bit put out when they asked which black I wanted. The whole point of picking black is no-one needs to ask you which black you want. But I picked the metallic black. With a black roof.)
Several people have asked for more info on the Lisbon signing, and I'm trying to find it out.
And tomorrow night is the Rotterdam signing, followed by the Saturday and Sunday at Elf Festival. I'm not really sure how to do a half-hour talk -- it's a bit short for a reading, so I may just do Question and Answers. (The two half-hour talks and two half hour signings replace the hour long talk and hour long signing of previous years. I'm willing to bet that it'll be an hour each a day again next year...) And a signing on Saturday late afternoon as well. Details at the WHERE'S NEIL area of the site.
Really looking forward to meeting as many people as possible at the various signings and suchlike. (The less said about the two 1997 stealth signings in the Netherlands, the better.)
And as a final note, GMZoe has made an astoundingly impressive index to the many unlikely subjects covered in the two years of this weblog...
You get things in his index like:
Muppets
-Gonzo: 11/29/02
-See also Jerry Juhl
"Murder Mysteries"
-Audio: 11/22/01, 11/27/01, 1/31/02
-Brief: 6/11/01
-Comic: 1/31/02, 5/07/02
-Movie: 5/11/01, 11/30/01
-Paradise Falls: 10/24/02
-Reviews: 7/25/02, 7/30/02
Music License: 2/04/03
Music:
-See Indivdual Artists, including: Abba, Tori Amos, Apples In Stereo, Black Box Recorder, Blur, Boiled In Lead, Lorraine Bowen, David Bowie, Kate Bush, Cats Laughing, Elvis Costello, Flash Girls, Future Bible Heroes, Thea Gilmore, Richard Goldman, Gothic Archies, Gourds, Hamell On Trial, I Am Kloot, Neil Innes, Kilburn And The High Roads, Lampchop, Langley Schools Project, Tom Lehrer, Maddy And Me, Magnetic Fields, Nina Nordenstam, One Ring Zero, Pachelbel, Pink Floyd, Pixies, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Rhino Records, Nino Rota, St. Saens, Sixths, Patti Smith, Stephen Sondheim, Carl Stalling Project, Steeleye Span, Al Stewart, Nigel Stonier, Elaine Stritch, Strokes, They Might Be Giants, Those Darn Accordians, Uncut, Suzanne Vega, Velvet Underground, Jim White
It's at http://members.aol.com/ngaimanvb/neil/index.html and is a very strange document in its own right.
Goodnight. (Now I go up to my hotel room, phone home and then write.)