My reward for signing a big ol’ stack of Ghost Brigades for the fine booksellers of Northern California: an ARC of Dan Simmons’ new book The Terror.

I mention this for the sole purpose of inspiring insane jealousy in at least a couple of people who I know read the Whatever. Because I am a sad and petty little man, that’s why. Oh, yes.

Ahhhh, I feel much better now. Shortly after posting yesterday I went out into the real world, which, as it turned out, had a nearby farmer’s market, at which I bought a lot of really amazingly fresh fruit and empanadas, and I had some of each, and then I self-medicated with a Coke, and all of that seemed to help my general demeanor. Then I was off to Locus headquarters, where I had a long and interesting conversation with Charles Brown, and also got to catch up with Amelia Beamer, Karlyn Pratt and Tim Pratt, who aside from being excellent people are also Locus staff and know how to make a guy feel welcome. Then it was back to the hotel, a quick meetup with Whatever commentator Pixelfish (who happens to work a block away from the hotel I’m staying at, which made it easy to say hello), and then dinner with Kevin Stampfl and his gal Monica. The Android’s Dream is dedicated to Kevin, so I slipped him the ARC for it; he’ll get a real copy as soon as I get one. And then, you know, I went and collapsed, because I had a long day.

Just in case you were wondering, the major stress-inducing issue I had yesterday was that I came to within about three minutes of missing my flight to California — My alarm clock didn’t go off and I woke up two hours later than I had wanted to, which was no good because my flight was out of Cincinnati’s airport, which was 90 miles and an entirely different state away, and now I would have to drive through Cincy’s morning rush hour traffic to get there. So I ended up doing 90 miles an hour, interspersed with several long stretches of doing about 5 miles an hour. I got to my gate literally as they were boarding the flight. It took me until I actually got into my hotel room before I realized I hadn’t actually unclenched. When I called Krissy, I told her she needed to get us a new alarm clock before I got back, because if I saw the old one again I was going to beat it to death with a hammer. So, yay! We’ll be getting a new alarm clock!

Today’s schedule: Signing and then later dinner with the Tor/Holtzbrinck reps and also Spider and Jeannie Robinson. Very excited about that — I haven’t met either of them yet and they seem like they would be fun dinner companions. Inbetween that I have some other business to attend to, which sounds all very mysterious but isn’t really.

I do have to say I’m a little depressed that so many people want to see me and I’m scheduled enough this time out that I’m not able to spend any good amount of time with them. I think what I need to do at some point is schedule a “hang out” tour, where all I do is fly to a city, find a central location, and then just hang out there all day and let people find me. That would be a lot of fun, I think, and God knows I want to have an excuse to hang out with some particular folks. I’ll have to mull on the logistics of doing something like that. And of getting a corporate sponsor.