22 years after publication, this still lives in my office.

(Harper Jaten)

Off to London again, to see Francois Roche lecture, powered by a shot of The Black Blood Of The Earth supercoffee provided by Funranium Labs…

Am at http://www.life-in-2050.com this evening, Tapebox are playing at The Social on Little Portland St at 9 (free) but I may have to skip that as Amanda Palmer has ordered me to show up to see her and Neil at her gig at Koko in Camden tonight. They just saw Malcolm McLaren’s funeral procession, will capture her twitpic of it tomorrow.

Yeah, it’s been nothing but the autopost systems for the last few days. Work has descended on me like a homeless person’s urine-soaked blanket. I’ll be back up to speed here in a day or so, once I’ve gotten some scripts out. Thank God I’m not going to San Diego.

And here I am in the local pub, with a bitch of an allergy attack, watching light rain freckle the ground. Five hours’ sleep on the plane, but my vision’s already starting to fuck with me a bit. Waiting for the allergy meds to kick in, and then I’ll head home and sleep for a few hours before taking my family out to dinner.

Did I mention Andy Hurley from Fall Out Boy came by the Chicago show to hang out? What a nice guy. And, as a non-drinker, hugely amused by my progressively getting more smashed during my Friday night gig. Which was extraordinarily well attended, by the way. In lieu of a new talk — once again, no time to write one — I read from CROOKED LITTLE VEIN for the first time, and, thank God, everyone laughed in the right places. After that. it was supposed to be about an hour and forty five minutes of Q & A, taking us up to the midnight point. We overran by an hour. It’s as close to stand-up comedy as anything, and I had to laugh when Ariana said afterwards, ”you’ve got some new material, then?” Anyway, it seemed to go down pretty well. Amusing to see how often I was misquoted in the next day’s reviews.

Vision’s packing up. To bed with me.

I am using this mandated re-test of the post-by-mail system to tell you of
something wonderful.

With the aid of the Colleen Doran Creator’s Grant, Kieron Gillen and Charity
Larrison have completed their darkly magical graphic novel BUSTED WONDER,
which you can read in its entirely online for free at bustedwonder.com.

You must go and read it now.

Have you ever shaken hands with a thousand people in a day? And signed a thousand books at the same time? Then done it all again the next day? Then tried to type something? I have.

Heroes Con in 2006 was the first big comics convention I’d done in years — the first since 1997, I think, when I wasn’t really as well-known in the field as I am now. Towards the end of the second day, after my second or third signing of the show, a book editor I know caught me as I was leaving the building and shook my hand. And I yelped.

Did you ever see that episode of THE WEST WING with Alan Alda as the presidential candidate whose paw got crushed to pulp by repeated handshakes? They weren’t making that up.

I don’t do these big American shows often — one a year at most — and so I tend to have a lot of signings scheduled for me. Two a day, two hours apiece, often running over that time. And, for some reason, everyone sticks out their hand when they turn up with their books. Now, trust me, signing books for two and a half hours is rough enough on a hand. I’m not saying it’s like breaking rocks or something. But if all you usually do with that hand is type all day, it’ll cramp after a couple of hours of sustained handwriting. And if you’re using the same hand to shake with a few hours’ worth of punters… well, I was icing that hand down on the Saturday at Heroes Con, and keeping it in my pocket when I walked around the floor (which was another weird event in itself).

I’ll post my signing schedule for the Chicago con when I get home. Five hours a day minimum. I’m the show’s guest of honour, and they figure there’ll be a lot of books for me to deface.

So Avatar Press tell me they’ve gotten me a hand brace for this show. Which makes me feel like a cripple, frankly. But when I got into this business, I never thought I’d be shaking more hands in a long weekend than a presidential candidate does in a month.

So, yes, I’d love to shake hands with you at the signing table. But if I do, my hand will fall off. And I’m not having you bastards eBaying my hand.

Unerring Pub Sense brings me to the platz at the top end of Karl Johans Gate, where I now have an outside table, cigarettes, and a glass of the local energy muck, Batteri. Cloudy and cool — a lot of people acting like it’s early summer. Folkie-hipster dude in an unfortunate hat is trying to sell a plastic-wrapped magazine to passersby. Quite a few tourists: Germans with insane moustaches, Danes in waterproofs, a shivering Japanese couple, an enormous black man in pink shirt and powder-blue tanktop photographing everything in the square. A plalanx of six women working the square with flowers, crooning ”Romani. Please give. Romani.” They have hard eyes, years past the point where you just resent people for having coins in their pocket. A lone military officer strides past, wearing one of those peculiar caps with the tassel hanging in front. The back of his shaven head prickles with the chill wind now driving into the square.

At the pub, fuelliing up with Red Bull. Car service picks me up in a couple of hours. With a bit of luck, I should be setting up Mission Control in a hotel room about nine hours from now. Air travel has gotten fucking ridiculous, really. Oslo’s only a couple of hours away by air.

Travel kit is now reduced successfully to the laptop (an ultralight Thinkpad X61), this phone, a Nokia N95 8GB, and the bluetoothed keyboard I’m writing this on. The phone is now armed with things like Worldmate, keeping me abreast of local weather (rain, what a surprise) and adjusted world times, and Joikuspot in case I have to turn the phone into a wifi hotspot in order to get work sent off the laptop. The phone’s music player is loaded up with the new Paavoharju records, Burial, Philip Jeck and Nurse With Wound, and I think I’m all set.

All I’m missing is the presentation I have to give tomorrow, which I haven’t written yet…!
See you on the other side.

I’m outside the pub, soaking in some heat, because I’m off to Oslo tomorrow and it is probably not hot in Oslo. It also occurs to me that I’m going to be too early for strawberry season in Oslo. They sell them in big barrows, and the scent fills the street.

I still haven’t written my presentation for the Norwegian Film Institute. Had no time. God only knows what I’m going to do. The time I’d blocked to think about it got eaten by a minor work crisis. I may just have to wing it for an hour and hope for the best.

They got me a smoking room in the hotel. I foresee a Thursday night spent bent over a notebook, fuelled by cigarettes and coffee. And I won’t reach the hotel until midnight.

Still, after the doomed presentation, I get to look at a new, Lovecraftian MMO game that’s being created in Oslo, which I’m looking forward to immensely.

Time for lunch.

This is really just a test of the post-by-email system using my Nokia N95 8GB phone and the little foldaway bluetooth keyboard, which I’ve fallen out of the habit of using. I need to get back up to speed with it. I’m carrying too many devices that only do part of the job right now, so I’m trying to fix up the phone so that I really only need to carry it and the keyboard for short trips.
I’m taking it and the laptop with me to Norway — it’s gotten to the point where I need a laptop if I’m away for more than a day or two, sadly. With Quickoffice installed, I can do a lot on this phone, right down to studying spreadsheets for the Artbots Festival — but international data charges for the phone are still onerous. Ten pounds per megabyte, as opposed to seven-fifty per 500MB/month at home (which still ain’t great). So in Oslo it’s going to be a laptop and praying for wifi…
Anyway. Let’s see if this works.