September 29, 2008
September 28, 2008
Baltimore Book Fest, Day Three
8:45 p.m.
Home, fed, hydrated, and flipping between White Nights (her) and Tron (me). My first experiment in live-blogging was a qualified success. Hard to do with the iPod because of the slow typing and the constant need to switch programs to reestablish the connection after sleep every time I have to put it down to talk to someone. A laptop would be ideal. Plus I can download photos (why oh why no camera on the touch?). Maybe next year the MWA website will have a blog and we can do this there. In the meantime, this concludes the little experiment on this writer’s messy workbench.
6:10 p.m.
First moment alone in the tent in over seven hours. Everyone else is over at the anthology reading, cheering them on. As they should be!
Mrs. Sotto Voce gets a hero award for printing out more flyers and running them over here — literally as the last flyer was given away.
Note: I edited this entry later to test ways of using Courier font to make non-typecast entries look more type-y. I’ll probably continue this in future entries…
September 27, 2008
Baltimore Book Fest, Day Two
3:26
Did I mention it was raining?
In between the torrential downpours (now accented with artillery-barrage quality thunder) we get a lot of traffic, and have even managed to keep up an average of one anthology sale per hour — a respectable average even in good weather!
1:10 p.m.
Rain. Lots and lots of rain today. We’re all stuck in the tent waiting for it to let up. Hopefully more to report later in the day.
September 23, 2008
Advice for Young People
Sitting here in my favorite chair in the den as the clock chimes ten; the cats have finally worn each other out from the evening’s wrestling. Reading a biography of an eccentric Englishman and savoring the cool breeze drifting through the window, and for some reason I find myself remembering a radio interview I heard many years ago while driving home one day in Santa Fe in my beloved canary-yellow ’72 Volvo sedan.
The interviewee was a famous wealthy businessman — I can’t remember who it was — who had just written an autobiography. I remember that he was funny, self-deprecating, and possessed of many fine and funny anecdotes.
The interviewer wrapped up by asking him if he had any advice for young people.
“Yes I do,” he replied. “Develop your eccentricities early. If you wait until you’re older, people will think you’re just going crazy.”
I have never forgotten that advice.
