Did a talk in the Turin bookfair yesterday and it was fun, except that no-one except me had expected that everyone there would have something they would want signed, and so when the talk finished there wasn't any plan for signing, so I found myself signing things being pushed at me by several hundred people who just sort of stormed the front area, so I scrawled as best I could, then went into the hall outside and finished signing for everyone who had followed. Then I met my Mondadori adult fiction editor, Eduardo, and did interviews for hours, and then I didn't go to a party and went up to the mall and ate some rice and went to bed instead. In week one or week two I would undoubtedly have gone to the party. Now I'm entering week four...
Fly to Paris in two hours. And the next flight I shall take will bring me home.
I know that there is more to Turin than a huge converted Fiat factory containing a book fair, a hotel, and a mall with a food court. But I will have to come back if I want to find out what that is.
...
Was delighted to see that my old friend Dave Carson has a website -- http://www.davecarson.net. If you've ever wondered what H.P. Lovecraftian things really look like -- I mean, really look like -- you should go and inspect Dave's art. I bought a picture called THE KISS from him in 1986, a perfectly stippled pen-and-ink drawing showing two things, neither of them entirely human, one male, one female, both in perfect evening dress, with their faces melting into each other, which my wife, seventeen years later, will still not allow to be hung anywhere in the house where she might have to see it, so it is only ever hung on walls she never looks at...