update!

Well, here's one of the things I've been up to lately: a long interview with David Mitchell, about his new book, The Bone Clocks. BookPage even let me have extra room (!) but still there were a few things that didn't fit - for example, Mitchell talked about what goes into naming his characters. "Synesthetically, names have colors and their own musicalities," he explained, and you wouldn't want "too many blue names next to each other." So if, say, "Michael is blue, Peter is red, David’s green, William’s yellow - they need to be spaced out, otherwise they sort of blend into each other." And then on top of that, "For my immortal characters, they kind of need a name that they might’ve chosen or that is in a way a miniature poem. Some names stick to the eyeball well. Benedict sticks, it’s stickier than Ben. You won’t be forgetting that character. These are all factors that come into play when christening a character. And I was really grateful for the 'replace' facility on my Mac."

Most of our conversation, though, was about aging and death and how much fun those are.

(For my next trick I get to interview Lydia Millet!)

In other news, it is 90 degrees here. So there isn't much other news.

Also I'm writing about Sweden (still!) for Lonely Planet. And a sizable hunk of the book is due Friday, so I'd better get back to that. But hey, there you go: an update.

(Hi Karl!)