…aka, A Bunch of Stuff I Meant to Post About Earlier, but I’m out of Practice with This Whole Blogging Thing, aka, Twitter is Bad For Discipline.
• Last Friday I was in Portland, Oregon for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ annual Feast of Authors. This is a banquet/speed-dating event in which each of twenty authors is assigned to a table of local independent booksellers. You get fifteen minutes to pitch and answer questions about your latest work. Then a bell rings, and you change tables and do it again, and again, and again, visiting seven tables in all. It’s a bit daunting at first, especially if you’ve just spent the last several years alone in a room talking to yourself, but the PNBA are a friendly bunch and by the third or fourth table the only issue is a powerful sense of déjà vu.
As a bonus for participating, you get a take-home swag bag filled with signed copies of your fellow authors’ books:
• While I was in Portland, I also stopped into Powell’s City of Books and signed stock, including a first edition Sewer, Gas & Electric and several copies of the British paperback edition of Bad Monkeys with the cool Alice-in-Wonderland cover. If you’re in town and looking to expand your Matt Ruff collection, now’s your chance.
• Sdera (הוצאת שדרה), the Israeli publishing house that was planning to bring out a Hebrew-language translation of Bad Monkeys, has gone out of business. It’s too bad—I was really looking forward to scoring a new alphabet. Also, according to Google Translate, “sdera” means (among other things) “spine,” so this would have been the spinal edition.
• The Mirage book tour is starting to come together. I want to wait for a few more confirmations before I start posting dates on the web site, but the launch event will be February 9 at the Elliott Bay Book Company.
Too bad about the Hebrew translation. I would loved to have had the opportunity to share my love for your books with my friends here in Israel. Also, sorry to ruin your ‘spinal edition’ idea but the meaning of שדרה in this case is boulevard/avenue. It’s written the same as the word for spine but pronounced differently (sdera vs. shidra). I sincerely hope your books will get translated into Hebrew at some point in the future!
Another illusion shattered, LOL. Google to its credit did also suggest boulevard/avenue/row, but I was hoping that since the publisher seemed to specialize in SF that the cooler sounding translation might be the right one.