Tad Williams Signing and Q&A Report

Last night Tad Williams was in London to do a signing at Forbidden Planet and also to take part in an interview and Q&A session. I had the pleasure of meeting him for the first time and it turns out he's a really friendly and nice guy.

New information from the signing: Tad confirmed that Empire of Grass, the second volume of The Last King of Osten Ard, is complete but needs to be edited. The publishers are mulling over when to release it: if they go for an early release (presumably in 2018), Tad will immediately start writing the concluding book of the trilogy, The Navigator's Children. If they decide to hold off until later, Tad will write the second short prequel novel, The Shadow of Things to Come, first. Unlike The Heart of What Was Lost, which was a bridging novel between the two trilogies, Shadow is a completely self-contained story with no connections to the latest work; in fact, it's more about Sithi and Norn characters from the first trilogy in the heyday of Sithi civilisation (Sithilisation?), so can come out before or after the trilogy is done.

Otherland remains under a film option but Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is not under any option at the moment, despite some vague interest from time to time.

Tad prefers writing his shorter novels like the Bobby Dollar books, which only took four to five months each to write rather than two to three years like his big epics. We may see more shorter books from him in the future.

When asked which of his fictional worlds he'd like to live in, he replied "The one with the best toilet facilities".

Video blogger Kitty G recorded the interview so keep an eye on her YouTube channel to see when it goes up.

Lynch/Rothfuss London signing

Last night I attended a joint signing by Scott Lynch and Patrick Rothfuss at the huge Forbidden Planet store in central London. I'd met Pat before, four years ago, but this was my first time meeting Scott.

The signing table looms into sight at last, like Mount Doom after Frodo's long journey. Or something.

The signing was packed out. I mean, huge. The queue snaked around the entire store back and forth like a slow-moving conga. Fairly late in the process someone counted the number of people in the queue and came back with 300, but I think it was a fair bit more than that. Forbidden Planet is used to hosting massive signings from movie stars, but the size of this queue for two fantasy authors whose names don't have the initials 'R.R.' or 'J.K.' in them seemed to take the staff by surprise. I arrived at the store at 5.30 (the signing was due to start at 6.00) and finally got to the signing table at around 8.15pm. It turns out S.M. Stirling was also doing a signing upstairs and I contemplated getting one of his books to get signed, but he was long gone by the time the Lynchfuss signing was done.

A Gentleman Bastard and myself, yesterday.

Following the signing, we repaired to a nearby hostelry where Pat and Scott chatted with fans and did a bit of a double act discussion talking about their books and writing process. It sounds like we shouldn't be holding our breaths about seeing The Doors of Stone in the near future, but things sounded a lot more hopeful about The Thorn of Emberlain (though neither author, with wisdom born of experience, offered up potential release dates).

Myself, Pat Rothfuss and Pat Rothfuss's beard, which had its own hospitality suite. We should really be charging Tad Williams for free advertising here as well.

It was a bit of a slog to get through the signing process, but Pat and Scott were good speakers and the evening was fun. In the future, however, I think I'll make sure I get to the signing a bit earlier.

The Queue. Long will it haunt my dreams.

The Forbidden Planet Multi-Author Event

I travelled up to London tonight for a multi-author signing event at Forbidden Planet, also known as the 'mingle' as the authors brushed shoulders with the great unwashed without the benefit of a desk to cower behind. The evening was the idea of author David Devereux, whose new book Eagle Rising (pimped by Graeme here) was being launched and he decided to invite along a bunch of other authors to turn it into a bit of a mini-SF con in the bowels of FP.


The other attending authors were the omnipresent Joe Abercrombie (who heroically strove to sell people copies of the 'new editions' of The First Law - where the typeface and font on the front cover are slightly different), Jaine Fenn, Suzanne McLeod, Mark Chadbourn, Alex Bell, Jon Courtney Grimwood, Steven Savile, Tom Lloyd and James Swallow. Also present, but only in a supporting capacity, were Chris Wooding and the ultra-popular Robert Rankin. Many books were bought, more were signed and much fun was had by all.

No scoops from the publishers this time. I did hear from Gollancz's dark lord Simon Spanton that Ian McDonald's The Dervish House (which will do for Turkey what River of Gods did for India and Brasyl did for, erm, Brazil) is now a 2010 release rather than a late 2009 one, but that's about it for insider info.

I did pick up a lot of books at the event and correspondingly hope to get my reading back in gear shortly as it's been taking a battering in favour of DVDs and computer games in the post-Christmas period.

EDIT: A slight amendment to reflect the fact that the evening was arranged by David and Danie from Forbidden Planet, and a most enjoyable evening it was as well.