Quiet Sunday, which I can use, to be honest. I just drafted another small essay on request, likely it’ll go online during the coming week. Was naive enough to be startled by just how ‘powerful’ Ars Technica is. That video interview I did in New York went online yesterday and I’m told that a search for my name with a limited time range shows page after page of that and various other sites linking to it. I’m grateful for Cesar Torres who did the review, discussion, and edited the interview. As I said when I wrote about it here, you never know how an interview went until you see it. I do bite my tongue once on the video, laughing, because Cesar asks a ‘nature of the universe’ question about what my books show. Call it my Michael Jordan imitation (basketball fans will get that). The piece is here:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/what-were-reading-river-of-stars-by-guy-gavriel-kay/
Spent part of the day at the Ad Astra convention yesterday and read from River again: a longer passage, as there was no interview to follow. The longer scene that seems to work is from chapter eight, in Chunyu (for those who have gotten that far). In the evening, sat in on a concert by Martin and Rebecca Springett, they played ‘Shan’s Theme’ from his River of Stars Suite, among other pieces.
What is the collective noun for a gorup of booksellers? (Go ahead, give it your best shot!). An index of booksellers, a shelf of booksellers, a biblio of booksellers? In any case, I am lunching and chatting tomorrow, escorted by Trish of Penguin, with about 30-35 of them at the head offices of Indigo Books here in Toronto. I like book people, for all the obvious reasons, and I find it interesting to get reports from the front lines. How are the books selling, where are they shelved, who are the buyers? Word of mouth is still a dominant factor, and I have always been generously supported by the people in stores who actually sell the books.
Tuesday, as I mentioned the other day, is a different kind of meeting. I’ll be online from 8-10 EDT at the huge website, reddit, ‘the front page of the internet’. The discussion is called AMA, for Ask Me Anything, and the last one I did there, last year, was a lot of fun. The discussion page goes live on Tuesday morning for questions to be posted, and I show up in the evening with a drink at my elbow and fire away with bad puns, er, cogent, lucid replies. You get there Tuesday by clicking here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy
Thursday evening I am reading and talking and signing for the very fine Words Worth Books in Waterloo. Starts at 7, but not at the store. They’ve booked the Princess Twin theatre on King St, and to defray that they are charging $5 a head, although 2 free tickets are being given for each copy of River purchased. Independent bookstores need to defray these costs when they have to book an external space for a large crowd and Words Worth is a great indie. We like those.