Journal

Tuesday, March 04, 2003
I was there in Cleveland in 1999 when said Author X conspicuously made a tiny uproar about the woman buying his book secondhand... it was after I had had my copy of Stardust signed by you (thank you) and I was holding a copy of his book and trying to decide whether or not to purchase it there. That incident made me put the book down and go to the library a few days later. And I didn't even really like it anyway, as I recall... Point is, hooray for reading and spreading the word, hooray for leaving your novels on park benches with tracking devices stuck to them, and hooray for Neil's ever-so-generous link posting history. --Brad Walsh (whose captivating website is located at http://www.geocities.com/raswirl615/journalmain2.html).

Which I put up just because it's nice to know that I didn't imagine it. I can't imagine what author X would have done if faced with those copies of Good Omens that sometimes turn up at signings, read so many times the ink's started to fade, swollen to twice their size having fallen in puddles and barely held together with scotch tape and dried soup. And the people who hand them to me start apologising because the book isn't pretty anymore, and I explain that that's okay, because it's loved, and sign it anyway....


...

And I'd typed that when the evening suddenly took a (briefly) nightmarish turn for the worse, as I got an e-mail from a friend, saying how sorry she was that a good, dear friend of mine (who as far as I knew was in the peak of health) had died. It took about 20 minutes of anguished phoning to establish that she'd googled her way into the obituary of someone else entirely with a similar name... And then, I was emotionally exhausted, and spent the next three or four hours building playlists for my iPod, which is something you can do without thinking at all.