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Tour reminder

I'm in the US this week; this is just a reminder that I'll be signing books in Portland at Powell's City of Books (1005 West Burnside Street) tomorrow (Thursday 11th) at 7:30pm onwards, and in San Francisco on Friday 12th at the Borders at 400 Post Street.

27 Comments

1:

Are you coming to Los Angeles?

2:

Sorry, no: the tour was organized in advance for me, isn't flexible, and LA is not on the list. (These are the only public dates -- a lot of the rest is either internal to Google, or hitting radio stations.)

3:

Is there a link to the tour schedule? I checked the front page but I'm too lazy to check old posts. Was hoping you'd be coming to/near Austin.

--Dave

4:

I live in Mountain View, is the Google reading open to the public?

5:

I'm not seeing any flyers at Google at all. I'm guessing the reading is in a lead vault buried deep below the surface, protected by Daleks.

6:

I always suspected there was more at that Google campus than met the eye

7:

I should read more carefully. So your publisher is not letting you publicize your tour dates on the web, because they've arranged exclusive promotions on local talk radio? Okay, that makes a lot of sense.... Well, I like your writing, but not enough to spend the next couple of weeks listening to NPR on the off chance you might be coming to the area and I might have the right station. Actually, I think I'd rather cut off a minor appendage.

--Dave

8:

The tour dates were posted on September 24th in a post titled "Signing Tour".

9:

Here as a matter of fact - are the list of tour dates/places.

10:

Any future plans to come to New York?

11:

Matt: not this year. (Maybe next year.)

12:

Hi Charlie,

I enjoyed your reading up in Seattle at the SF museum. Thanks for coming!

Do you always get interrupted that much? You handled it like a champ.

13:

the time for the San Francisco signing is 7pm. hope there are plenty of books available.

14:

Looking forward to seeing you at Google on Friday. I have my sweaty hands on a copy of the book and am trying to read as much of it as possible before then. Very engaging and enjoyable so far.

I do note quite a few cultural references that are going to be hard to understand on this side of the pond - and some that I don't get after 20 years away from England.

Your prediction of avatars migrating across compatible game platforms is just about to come true (see "O'Reilly Radar" post on this.)

Coincidently the weather has turned cold in the Bay Area just as you are about to arrive. Rain predicted for Friday, then sunny again after you leave. Talk about bringing the weather with you!

15:

Glad I checked your blog today; if I'm not totally burned out after walking the dog I'll be heading for Powell's.

16:

So, who would win in a fight?

17:

Good seeing you at Powell's tonight; had sleepy jet-lagged spouse in tow or might have stayed longer.

18:

I saw you last night at Powell's, and I forgot to give you the 1.5 oz. bottle of saline spray I had brought. I was the old guy, bald with a trim beard (and backpack and cane, the latter not used).

This in response to your earlier comment on my comment. The 1.5 ounce is within the ridiculous US and UK standards. Get some. It's well worth dropping by a Walgreen's or any decent size pharmacy (chemist to you Brits).

I haven't started Halting State yet, I'm backed up. I enjoyed your talk, but I think maybe you should read a little less and talk more about your history and work.

You made me nostalgic for the days I was programming and doing systems analysis in the early to mid 1970's. Unfortunately, i was promoted too quickly - one eyed man in the land of blind, computer illiterate managers. I was a prince among men until yours - and later my son's generation - came along.

Thanks for stopping in Portland, and I apologize for the less than optimal turnout.

Richard York

19:

Charlie,

It was nice to meet you in corpus at Powell's, and enjoyable to hear you reading from Halting State.

I was doing a little poking around in Google Maps this morning and discovered the Street Views photos, which make using Google Maps a lot like playing Myst. The photos don't get quite to my house, but come within a few blocks. I wish I'd seen them a day or two earlier; I could have suggested you mention them at the Googleplex today, and ask them to make photographing Edinburgh a priority, so you can publish a Halting State overlay and mousing tour.

20:

Ah, ain't that a pain? I was intending to go see you at Powell's but it completely slipped my mind. Hope you had a good visit, and the rest of your trip goes well.

21:

Good meeting you at Google today. For some reason I expected you to be a bit prickly, but you were most engaging. I thought you read very well, and the 2nd passage with Elaine's POV was the one I would have picked too.

I just wish you would have had more time to answer questions about the book, your writing in general and the technology, but I saw that you were being slotted in before the following tech talk so you had a pretty hard stop. Can't complain, much better venue for me than shlepping up to SF, finding parking and fighting the crowds.

I would guess that the video of the talk will be published by Google in due course.

Oh, and having nearly finished the novel, I like it a lot, notwithstanding my scepticism about the fashion sense of wearing "tech specs" (It's something Jack would do, maybe Sue, but I doubt Elaine or Liz) ;-)

Have a good flight back.

22:

Hey, thanks for the night of undying passion at Borders last night. Would've been nice to stick around & talk more about Craig Venter, metagenomics, synthetic biology and so on, but I did have an armchair to catch. Maybe sometime in Edinburgh...

Here's a link to the Carlson Curve stuff I mentioned: http://biohackery.com/node/33

I felt a bit obvious asking you the "how did you become a scifi writer" question-- I guess one of the things I was interested in was the writers' groups you've been involved with. I know you were in one in Edinburgh and I've been thinking of trying to find something similar in SF. Just curious about your experiences of them and how helpful you felt they'd been.

Oh and BTW, the Laundry novels are ace, but I have to say that hearing you describe that object-oriented Perl app for credit card transactions was scarier than a whole oceanload of Old Ones. ;)

Love Halting State so far btw. Hope the tour goes well.

23:

Alex @21: if I hadn't been on a tight schedule, I'd have wanted to stay for Randall Schwartz's talk too. (I nearly had an embarrassing fanboy moment there -- a flashback to my former perl mangler days.)

Iron Thighs: no problem! And I think you just suggested the topic of my next long blog piece (on workshops) when I get over my jet lag ...

24:

Charlie,

Glad to hear you got back OK. I just wanted to let you know that I finished Halting State, and I loved it; it was a wild ride and fun every bit of the way. Got me thinking a lot more about favor nets and other cyber-mediated social structures.

And now I know how to lure you back to Portland for that evening at the pub. I promise to introduce you to Randall Schwartz; we've worked together on and off since the early '80s, and I see him every three or four months. Deal?

25:

Okay, Bruce ... I think you got a deal. OK?

26:

Done. Give me a yell when you can fit it into your schedule. And try to figure out how to take it a little slower than this last trip; that sounds like it would try the constitution of a pulp hero.

27:

"Oh shite!"

As an Embra ex-pat who's been reading Halting State while taking the BART back & forth under the Bay (and is secretly tickled by the various Embra-of-the-future references...) I'm just a little gutted to have missed this reading. Oh well, nice to see it's online.

"You are wasting time at work, reading rarely-visited blogs, when you realize that you missed something that would have been equally work-evasive, but less monitor-focused...."

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This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on October 10, 2007 5:31 PM.

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