In which I don't after all know everything...

[desperance]

Post! From America! The contracts for the Year's Best story, and a copy of Lace and Blade, so I can finally read everybody else's story, yay!

Um, after I've read the novel I'm supposed to be blurbing. Whoops.

Oh, and I'm sort of supposed to be reading my own novel as well, aren't I? Yikes...

Actually, to be fair to myself (and why not?), my own book is now five-sixths read and scribbled on, and almost a quarter has been processed. It's just slow, so sloooowwww, I ache with the burden of it all...

And! I was in mid-aching, skullsweating over the pages this morning when this man came up to me - in the Silence Room, yet! - and asked if I was by any chance an expert in Cuban political history.

I denied it, obviously, though I do know more this week than I did last. And so he wandered off and asked someone else, and was as quickly repulsed. And okay, this is the Lit & Phil, wherein all the knowledge of the world is contained (it's kind of like LJ in that respect, only solid), but even so. That's just so ... random, y'know? I might have wondered if I had the look of an expert in Cuban political history, except that the woman he asked next looked nothing like me.

Comments

[szandara.livejournal.com]

It strikes me as one of those code phrases from a spy novel...if you had said "No, my specialty is Eastern European royalty" he'd have dropped a pen on the floor before he left, and it would have been full of microfilmed evidencte that the Mafia had assassinated Benazir Bhutto to protect their poppy-growing cartel on the Pakistani border.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Damn! You're right, of course. If only I were quicker to recognise these things... (There are famous occasions in my past where I had to be told by a third party that someone was making a play for me. I am a sad innocent, and tend not to recognise codes unless they're labelled as such.)

[szandara.livejournal.com]

Labelling would defeat the whole point of the message being in code, though, wouldn't it?

Just as well that you're not a specialist in Eastern European royalty...if you were, the Lit & Phil would now be a smoking pile of rubble, and you'd be getting chased down alleys by men with unplaceable accents and large guns. Of course you'd eventually team up with a tough-talking but attractive cop who knows where the MacGuffin is and how the Bad Guys tend to use it to destroy civilization as we know it (having gotten a good start on that by detonating the Lit & Phil) and you'll get, at the very least, a nice cinematic kiss out of it, but still, it all sounds rather exhausting, doesn't it?

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

All this excitement makes our news that this morning's post brought a cheque from Amazon with your name on it seem rather tame, doesn't it? Assuming it's still standing, shewhomust will be at the Lit & Phil tomorrow evening and a more remunerative type of handover might be achieved.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hee. Money...

I wasn't myself planning on being at the Lit & Phil tomorrow evening, though. Was I...?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oof. Way too much; I am a fan of my quiet, quiet life, bedecked as it is with Silence Rooms and solitude (except for hellcats, obviously).

I am suddenly seized with the deeply attractive idea of getting different results from different code-phrases. If Eastern European royalty brings rubble and attractive policepersons, d'you suppose the mating practices of the Giant Stick Insect of New Guinea would produce a prototype ray-gun and a very rapid trip in a sleek sports car, with added helicopter for authenticity?

[szandara.livejournal.com]

Quite possibly. The question is, will "no, in fact I'm a fantasy writer" bring incredibly lucrative offers to buy the film rights to one of your books and a job writing the screenplay, and an eventual Oscar nomination requiring the purchase of extremely stylish eveningwear?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Be nice, wouldn't it? Except that I don't really want to write screenplays - but I know a man who does. He can have the job, I'll have the eveningwear...

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I will get my Lace&Blade this weekend. Looking forward!

[samarcand.livejournal.com]

Apropos of the Lit and Phil - I noticed this on the local BBC website: The Lit and Phil In Pictures