In which I get to the point eventually, I promise.

I have not been well. This means this post is kind of blithery, and contains footnotes.

So, I have been Not Well, in ways which I am not going to share with the Internet, don’t worry. This means I have been doing a lot of lying in bed listening to podcasts. [1] Most recently I’ve been listening to the last two DBSA podcasts, which happened to be about the Romantic Times conference and Book Expo America.

I knew almost nothing about either of those events, so I was grateful to have some soothing voices tell me about them while I gritted my teeth and tried to be less ill. [2]

Anyway, so there are these huge events out there which I’d been almost utterly unaware of dedicated to the business of selling books, where lots of money gets spent on everything from booth carpeting to author-themed pet food can covers, and yet occasionally people buy my books instead anyway.

That is an awesome feeling. Particularly if you’re feeling like you’ve been run over by a herd of angry glyptodonts and want to just be Much Less Ill, Right Now.

And it’s mostly down to the people who have passed on the books to other people through enthusiastic word-of-mouth and the people who have written reviews saying ‘I loved this!’ and the people who have written reviews saying ‘These bits worked for me but these bits didn’t’. I wish I could give you all an ‘Ankaret Wells Approved Vrykol Chow’ pet food can cover, I really do. Even though I generally don’t read reviews because I take the view that they’re not for me, they’re for readers, and I’ve got other things to do with my time like writing books.

On another note, Kindle Worlds happened, but I’m not touching that until I’ve had more sleep.

And on a final complete tangent. I’ve been reading Leigh Butler’s Wheel Of Time Re-Read on my Kindle, and my personal fan theory about the reason we don’t get to see much of the Black Tower is that they’re just as prone to getting naked and spanking each other as everyone else in the WOT ‘verse but the authors were of the opinion that no one wanted to see all those naked manbits.

I can hear you all muttering ‘Get some more sleep now, Ankaret’ at your screens. Sleep now, yes. Sleep.

[1] Once I’d managed to wrangle the latest Firefox build out of refusing to download MP3s but insisting on playing them instead, which was an unwanted wrinkle in my day. The general consensus online seems to be that it’s something to do with QuickTime, but I don’t have QuickTime installed, so, yeah. I’ve found a workaround now, anyway.

[2] I’m pretty much always interested to hear about things I know nothing about as long as I can see a way of backing out of the conversation when I’ve absorbed enough and can no longer process. One of the many reasons you should be reading Arabella Flynn’s Unsolicited Advice is that she mentions coming to the point of ‘Oh, I’ve heard of that, but I don’t know much about it’ as a conversational goal. That lady is My People.

Image from Bad Postcards