April 8

Leaving Washington DC --

Finally on a jet-sized jet, and thank the gods for it, too, because Zeus is having a little fun with us today: we're bouncing around like a handful of jumping beans inside a pachinko machine.

DC was a great stop, at least partly due to the Organizator, Paul Peachey, my escort for both days. He could give lessons to C-3P0. This guy had a mental map of all the major bookstores en route to the events, and had them primed and prepared for our arrival so that -- both days -- I had stock-signed something like 300 books before I even got to the actual signings. Both days. He claimed his secret plan was to make UNsigned copies into the DC-area Hot Collectible . . .

Thanks again to the 501st, out for both events. At Olssons, we even had a published SFF novelist as the Sith in Black Armor Himself: no less than Roger Sharp, author of PSYCLONE.

Did an interview with Eye On Books' Bill Thompson, who (as it happens) is a Downstate Illinoisian like myself. I'm counting on that homestate connection; maybe he'll edit out any idiot remarks that may have slipped through the clutch-gap between my second-gear brain and fifth-gear mouth.

And I had a live -- or semi-live tape-delay -- interview on a Jacksonville morning-zoo-style radio show that included a Star Wars Geek-Off against their resident fandroid, whose name is claimed to be Amadeus. This, I must point out, was not only at ten minutes before eight this morning, but until I picked up the phone I had no idea it was going to be

1) live,
2) raucous, and
3) mildly razzing on Us Fans.

I can hold my own, though. When they asked me who was the weirdest geek I'd had to deal with at a signing so far, I told them, "Oh, they never get really bad -- it's not like they're talk radio hosts or anything . . ."