In The City

Norfolk and Canterbury signings were both fun, a nice way to start a tour, and were for about 120 people each (the room upstairs in Canterbury holds about 130). Which made them easy and comfortable and everyone got chatted to and the answer to "doesn't your hand hurt yet?" was "No." (I cannot guarantee the same for the event on Tuesday night.) In Canterbury I was interviewed by a couple of nice Finns, mostly about the STUDY IN EMERALD broadsheet poster that Jouni Koponen has designed (and which I'll write about here fairly soon).

I'm going to try and pre-sign a large number of copies of ANANSI BOYS (and maybe some of the others) so that people on Tuesday Night who, having enjoyed me and Lenny Henry talking and reading and answering questions and suchlike, take one look at the number of people waiting and decide that they have trains to catch or babysitters to relieve or simply that if they don't get out by midnight they will turn into a pumpkin, can, if they want, buy a presigned book and escape pumpkinhood.

Email is barely working and the 20 pounds a night internet service is sort of spotty. Still, at least they fill the room with free bottles of posh water.

After the Canterbury signing I went off to stay overnight with Dave McKean and his family, and Dave and I stayed up really late talking, setting the world to rights and so on. He showed me some of the MirrorMask DVD extras, and his script to Signal to Noise.

Now back in hotel. Tomorrow is interviews all day...

(And I see that blogger.com has just made it work so that even if the spotty hotel internet goes down at the exact moment you try to post, what you wrote will still be there when you go back a screen. Wisely paranoid, I'd already copied it, but still, it was nice to see that there was some protection there.)