Further to my last:

Of course I never prepare for panels, any more than I prepare for books. Like dressing nicely at cons, it never even occurred to me that anybody would, until I discovered that actually some people do. Some people go in there with notes.

Not I: but on this occasion, it seems wise not to busk it in my usual over-casual manner. I can talk about my own pirates easily enough, Chinese or English or to come; but I may need more than that. So, people: do my homework for me. I don't have time to read books, but I'd like to go in there with a list. Great pirate novels by other people, with or without an SF/F/H tendency. Go. The comments section is open house.

[ETA: don't be shy. Of course your own pirate novel is great. Title and author-of-record, please; year and publisher are voluntary but useful.]

Draft

Actually, it's hard even to call this a draft; but it starts at a beginning and goes on to an end and then stops, so I guess.

I wouldn't ordinarily send anything away in this condition - I haven't even read the second half of it, let alone sorted out the contradictions - but it's late already, and I'm away on Sunday to Oxford and California and WFC; it would be weeks anyway before I could produce a clean draft, so editor and agent may as well have this one now and we can all kick it together.

So that's gone. For the rest of this afternoon I am reading The Retribution, which is fun, and trying to think of questions to ask Val, not that I shall need that many because, y'know. She's Val, and she makes it easy.

Also, in between chapters, I am packing bags of books. Breaking up my hardback crime section. This is (surprise!) not easy and not fun. There are books I've read and won't reread; there are books I haven't read, and probably won't. You'd think that those could just go, wouldn't you? But some of them are books by friends, or books by people who were friends ten or fifteen or twenty years ago; books by people who were friends, and are dead. Books that I think are important, whether or not I actually want or need to read them again. Books that are valuable, ditto. Books that are an utter surprise ("Wait, what? Dennis Wheatley wrote science fiction? Oh, phew - it's in the wrong section! I don't have to decide about that one today!").

So on and so forth. Some books acquire meaning beyond their story, by their simple physical presence in my life. It's kind of like old letters from people you're not in touch with any more. I'm trying to take this at a run, with a default assumption that they go unless I really can't bear to part with them - but it ain't easy, and I think I'm weakening, I think I'm slowing down.

Something I don't know

It occurs to me that I have never in my life sold a book that belonged to me, barring only books I wrote. I don't really know how to go about it. I'm going through all these hardback crime novels, and some of them are first editions and some of them are rare and quite a few have some kind of value, though it may only be ten or fifteen quid (but a bag full of those is a hundred quid or more, and that ain't hay).

I don't know - what does one do? Ebay, Amazon? A dealer? Or just shrug and let the Lit & Phil have them anyway? They're getting the ones I don't bother to check, so I expect there some bargains in there already...

Post-match report

So I stressed myself beautifully this afternoon over packing books into bags, but I did clear about twelve feet of shelving, which is, um. Not that much. I think I have 600 feet in this house?

Anyway. Many bags of books. And then Val came by in the Land Rover, to take me and books to the Lit & Phil; and suddenly everything was very much nicer because she's one of those high-achievers who nevertheless have that gift of making you relax around them. Also, she gives great gig, for the audience and her interrogator both. Really I'm redundant, but it's a very pleasant form of redundancy, sitting and chatting with an old friend and catching questions from the audience and like that.

And we were painted! I don't think I've been painted before. Emma was up in the gallery, and produced a painting of us doing gig in library in very little more time than the gig itself demanded. 'Straordinary. Other people's art...

And now I am back, and Mac has given up trying to persuade me that I forgot to feed 'em before I left (I did not do that; they had Early Tea), but Barry hung around the kitchen in hopes, and I was spooning sauce into a pan and looked down at him just as I was chasing a mushroom with the ladle, and I said, "Baz, it's a mushroom, you're not the one who likes mushrooms..." And he just looked at me, and then I remembered the two pounds of beef that had also gone into the sauce, and yeah. Like that.

But I haven't had a drink all day, I suddenly realise. Hmm. Quick tot of whisky before bed? I am ill, y'know...