Also, my brother has co-written a book about the Millennium Trilogy.

Go The F**K To Sleep narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.

Amiable and chatty after an hour and a quarter of signing his book, with about two hundred people behind me.

"Is there someone here who's getting a book for them?" he asked a few signings ahead of me.

"Craig?"
"Yes, actually."
"Oh, thank you!"(signing) "Not a lot of Craigs here tonight, more Stuarts."
"Any Andys?"
"A few Andys, yeah."
"Oh, and I thought you'd like to know you've arrived. I just saw a film called The Book Of Zombie and there's a plot point about Pegg Cola."
(Face lighting up) "Pegg What?!"
"Pegg Cola. Figured you'd want to know."
(grinning) "I love the zombie community. There you go, cheers!"

So, who's going to see Burke And Hare next week?

I just got done reading The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter and while I don't agree with everything it's full of funny, clever, touching, reassuring with the writer's block and the frustration and the rethinking and the getting-a-cold-when-you're-done. And, oh yes, story ideas. Which I will be stealing. This was nearly the 2009 Easter special, for example.

Not as shiny and full-colour and big and sumptuous as the hardback, obviously. And hardly any doodles in the new 300 pages. But still, liked it, liked it.

There were returns, so I was able to see Neil Gaiman's reading. (So if anyone wants to try it tomorrow for him talking to Ian Rankin, may you be likewise lucky.)

( Note-deciphering and faulty remembering of about twenty minutes of talking, as well as about forty minutes of reading which is available in book form. )

Yes kids, the Fringe directory has arrived. 93 pages of comedy, Dylan Moran playing where he lives for two days, One Man Star Wars guy returning with One Man Lord Of The Rings, and the shock result listed above in the theatre bit.

The Book Festival directory has also arrived. I'm going to see Neil Gaiman if I have to cut my way into the tent. Possibly the talk with Ian Rankin about his John Constantine book being launched.

I may also go and throw things at Mark Millar's head.

Via dalziel_86: Book Covers Gone Wild

I give it six weeks until we see someone using this idea in an advert.

After last year's dearth of genre material, this year we have...

Terry Pratchett (Possibly for the last time. :( )
Iain (M) Banks
Dave McKean
John Howe
Bryan Talbot
Alan Grant
Jill Webster

And Sean Connery.

This week's BBC iPlayer essential - part two of BBC Four's The Worlds Of Fantasy discusses the epics and their origins in the horrors of reality, comparing JRR Tolkien at the Somme and Meryvn Peake at Belsen, talking to authors and academics and including archive footage of the authors. More and later fantasy next week, definitely including Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and possibly JK Rowling saying she didn't think she was writing fantasy.

(I actually passed her in the street last week. This was unusual for me, unlike spacelem, who knows where she lives. ;) I wish I'd recognised her a bit earlier and gotten a chance to talk to her. I like to think I wouldn't have babbled insanely - after all, I've largely maintained my cool around people I'm a much bigger geek about.)