The Baillie Bugle

The Bristol Comics Expo was more fun than I expected and I’m really glad I went. As usual I drank and ate with the cream of UK comics talent and, as usual, I didn’t get a chance to hang out with a whole bunch of people that I meant to.

If anyone can remember who I was having the Bladerunner origami argument with in the bar can you remind me…

On the way back myself and Joel chose a leisurely sight-seeing route and took in a white horse, Bradford-upon-Avon and Jaspre and his daughter.

Some things I’ve found:

The LA Times profiles Charlie Kaufman
(login bugmenot@mailinator.com and password bugmenot from www.bugmenot.com)

Charlie Kaufman is a great American writer. Let's not equivocate or qualify this in any way. Yes, he writes for the movies; yes, his medium is the 100-plus-page script. But in all the ways that matter—his mastery of structure, his voice and vision, his recognition of the power of the word to remake the world—he stands with the finest writers of his generation, among them David Foster Wallace, Mona Simpson, Michael Chabon, Aimee Bender, Colson Whitehead and Jonathan Safran Foer. At times, he is even the best.

And The Times tells us about a woman whose book outsold Dan Brown’s, but didn’t make any money from it...

Ms Simmons, from Shenley in Hertfordshire, is the author of New Standard English, a series of text books for primary school children that has sold 105 million copies in China.
But unlike Brown, who has earned £250 million from royalties for his novels, Ms Simmons took a fixed payment of £160,000.

(Well okay - she made some, but not as much as Dan Brown)

Right... back to work before heading off for the weekend.