"You know, I grew up in Wales, and when I became a writer and could choose to live wherever I wanted, I ended up going back… to Wales. I think we spend a lot of our adult lives trying to go back to where we were happiest as children."

Of all the insightful, delightful, and refreshingly honest things Jasper Fforde said this evening, in a quiet, little intimate talk hosted by the Lewis Carroll Society, this was probably the one thing above all that hit home for me. For obvious reasons, I guess.

I said when I blogged about Terry Pratchett that he was like an uncle (an old one), and Neil was like a rockstar, as he has so often been called. Jasper Fforde? Is very… dadlike. I don’t have any uncles like Terry (and I certainly don’t know any rockstars personally so can’t compare to Neil), but Jasper Fforde was so uncannily like my dad, in his offbeat sense of humour and devoted geekery towards a subject. If you’d replaced the games with books, the stacks of Magic: The Gathering cards and multi-sided dice collection with the huge plywood painting of the Cheshire Cat that hangs, grinning, over Jasper Fforde’s desk at home as he writes (he painted it himself, he told us with a gleeful childlike glint in his eyes), the likeness would have been even more remarkable.

And what an absolute treat and privilege it is to listen to one of your favourite living authors talk about one of your favourite dead authors – and talk about his work with an assurance that showed he knew his stuff while at the same time always staying accessible. I didn’t agree with every single thing he said about Alice (e.g. he thinks Alice is bland and almost a secondary character, while I think Alice is the most important character because she represents the reader wading through Wonderland), but much of what he said had me, and many others, nodding fervently: the wondrous meta-naming White Knight scene in Through the Looking Glass, how brilliant it is that the illustrations of Alice going through and coming out of the glass are on the same pageleaf, how important absurdity and nonsense is not only to comedy writing but to the whole of English culture, how, when he came to the books at five, re-read them at 13, and re-read them again at 31, they were completely different experiences, how he had hoped to layer and texture his own books so that his readers could re-read them and pick out different things each time – and much much more than I can write about.

"I was in Oxford filming Quills and decided to make a pilgrimage to the museum there to see the dodo that Tenniel and Carroll would have looked at themselves, as the models for Tenniel’s illustration. So I stood there, in front of the dodo, standing by the case and looking at it like you do on a pilgrimage – you know, you think to yourself ah, they would have stood here, and you (shifts position) kind of stand there yourself… anyway, so I wondered, what if you had a Dodo Home Cloning Kit? And I walked over to the shop, and asked if they sold Dodo Home Cloning Kits. And because this was Oxford, and the lady there probably had 18 PhDs or DPhils or whatever they call them, she calmly said to me: ‘Come back in 20 years.’"

And voila, the dodos in the Nextian world were born.

Interesting info from other questions that were asked:

• Melanie Bradshaw wasn’t inspired by anything in particular, he just liked the idea of an inter-species love story
• His favourite Nextian invention is the translating carbon paper (he also likes the rice and lentils Entroposcope)
• It was deliberate that the libraries in Shades of Grey are all empty, as a counterpoint to the Bookworld Library which has every book in the world, he thought it fitting that his new series had libraries with no books at all
• In the original drafts Acheron Hades’ hideout was in a high-tech zeppelin floating in the middle of nowhere; his (also Welsh) wife complained that this was too sci-fi and geeky, and Fforde’s response was something along the lines of "oh, all right, let’s make his hideout in some remote cottage in Wales then, you… you… Welsh socialist!" – which is, apparently, the true story of why Wales is a Socialist Republic in the books
• The reason Jane Eyre was picked for the first novel was because, starting out, and wanting to be very accessible, it was the only novel he could think of that he was sure everyone would know something about, even if this knowledge was limited to "it’s a musty old Victorian book"

And finally – an unexpected bonus!

Jasper signed my book, and threw in a couple of extras as well :)

Only 2000 of them postcards in the world! Though, I must say, I wish I had got the Spoon Ishihara one.

Host: It is my great pleasure to introduce Terry Pratchett, who, in case you didn’t know, is the unbelievably best-selling author of the Discworld series –
Terry (in exaggerated, loud whisper): I think they know that.

Terry Pratchett is awesome.

In point form, because I’m all fluey and keep making typoes and can’t make coherent paragraphs:

• I think the only other author I’ve met before is Neil Gaiman. Terry had a very different sort of feeling from Neil – while Neil is like a rockstar, Terry’s like your uncle. He was very warm and fuzzy. Interestingly, I think this also sums up the difference between their writing.
• When asked about the translation of Nation from novel to play, his pithy answer was that it was of course incomparable because "a playwright has a whole orchestra of people and things to play with – including an actual orchestra (gestures vaguely to orchestral pit) – and all I have is one lousy alphabet!"
• It was heartwarmingly evident how much he loves Nation. He speaks about it with a great deal of affection. And during the Q&A, when people kept asking Discworld questions, he said at one point that it would be nice to have a Nation one (only for the very next question to begin "In the Discworld books…")
• My absolute favourite part was when someone asked him why he chose to set Nation in a parallel universe instead of our world, and his first response was exactly what had popped into my fledgling-writer mind immediately: "Because it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card!" (elaboration: "If I had set it in our world, someone somewhere would have triangulated the location of the cannibal island and it would have been inconvenient if it had turned out to be, oh, New Zealand or something")
• He did go on to give a much more detailed and thought-provoking answer about how parallel worlds, more so than purely made-up worlds, have the power to invoke elements of our own while allowing you to change things enough to turn it upside down – which is what G. K. Chesterton defined fantasy as: looking at our world in a different way. It reminded me of my dissertation work on fantasy and made me a bit wistful for academia…
• His favourite Discworld character is Tiffany Aching (which elicited some cheers from a Tiffany Aching contingent in the circle), because he is writing her right now, and, says Terry, he tends to get under the skin of whoever he’s writing right now – but second after Tiffany is, of course, Vimes (which elicited significant cheers from all over the theatre).
• Response to "which Discworld character is most like you in personality?": "Oh, god, my wife is in the audience, I can’t answer that. Ermmmm. Commander Vimes on a good day."

There’s something to be said for sitting in a theatre with one of your favourite authors and a horde of his fans :) the book geek in me is thoroughly happyfied. And just this afternoon I found out by email that I’d managed to score a ticket for a Jasper Fforde talk hosted by the Lewis Carroll Society, about Carroll’s influence on his work! Could that combination possibly get any more jaw-droppingly amazing? No, I thought not.

My Wednesday and Thursday this week have basically vanished into air (literally), and my body clock is currently in some whacked-out timezone that is neither UK nor Australian, so I’m feeling pretty disoriented. But nothing beats the feeling of being back, of hanging out in my living room with my laptop with my siblings watching telly. Daddy took me out laptop shopping today followed by a trip to the Sydney Botanic Gardens to take advantage of the awesome warm weather, and we had lunch at Masuya, a family favourite Japanese restuarant in town; I also finally managed to satisfy my perpetual xiaolongbao craving with a trip to a new Shanghainese restaurant near our home, and we made plans to hit the beach tomorrow for some good fresh fish and chips, and pancakes later in the day (why yes, I have planned my days around food)!

Speaking of new laptops, I basically presented my dad with my very few specific requirements (must be able to play Dragon Age and NWN2, must have good sound, must have Win 7, doesn’t need to be that light/portable as I mostly just leave it at home anyway, must not be ugly), and he picked out this drop-dead sexy beauty for me:

Toshiba Qosmio X500

This, my friends, has to be the Mustang of laptops or something. It’s clearly built to be a gaming rig, hence its massive size and high-end specs, and I’m just hoping that my back won’t break lugging it back to Singapore and London, but dang it’s pretty. They’ve apparently been flying off the shelves so fast that they don’t even put it out on display in shops because then they’d just perpetually have no stock. We had to ask for it specifically. Thank goodness for the internets.

My dad’s l33t bargaining skills also resulted in us getting a copy of Dragon Age, a new pair of headphones, and a Logitech GX9 mouse thrown into the deal – for less than the RRP of the laptop. w00t! :D

I can’t believe I actually did manage to redesign after all, not to mention whip up something I rather like, though the process was probably made easier by the fact that I knew for sure I wanted this layout to

1) have dark text on a light background
2) be very simple
3) contain the colour red
4) have a swirly embellishment
5) not be based on a lyric

the latter since most of my previous layouts so far have had some element of a song in them, whether inspired by one or with lyrics in the design. So my favourite line from King Lear supplied the textual decoration this time – you can never go wrong with Shakespeare – and the rest of it, given the above conditions, kind of wrote itself very quickly.

After getting this done and dusted, I was going to have a rant, triggered by a mildly traumatic night out yesterday, about the drinking culture here and how I will never ever understand it, nor the practice of clubbing, and/or making friends with strangers at pubs and bars and similar establishments, or thinking it is okay to make out with people you’ve just met just because you’re both unattached. In fairness to the friend who dragged me along on this ill-advised jaunt last night, she is an exceedingly warm-hearted and intelligent person, I know she didn’t mean any harm, and my frustration is no doubt down entirely to cultural and personal differences of opinion. But I just feel like… this is a world I will never get, and so much of England is that world. Especially the drinking. There are a lot of good things I can say about this country, but it has its really ugly sides, like all other countries. This is one of them. The hour, however, compels me to keep this brief and go to sleep, and so this has to be the extent of my rant – which is probably a good thing, as I’m sure I’ll feel better in the morning.

I try not to get too geeky here (and have often contemplated forking geek posts to a new blog altogether because I often feel like I have a lot of geeky things to say regarding Linux and software that will alienate 99.9999% of my current audience – to fork or not to fork?), but that said, I feel like I have to be all anarchic and go against the tide of Google Chrome OS posts out in the blogosphere today, and say that I… am really not all that excited about it. Yet.

The thing that strikes me about Google Chrome OS – and what I’m sure a lot of other regular Linux users have also realised – is that it offers nothing radically new enough to warrant all the hype around it. If you want an OS for your netbook that boots up really quick and does nothing except go online, there’s already Jolicloud, and the upcoming gOS Cloud that boots directly into a browser, which is what I imagine Google’s OS will do. There are literally countless Linux distros optimised for netbooks. And if you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty (it isn’t as hard as it sounds, I’ve tried it!), you can always roll your own Linux OS with something like Arch Linux, which basically starts you off from a command line and lets you install whatever you want on top of the veryVERY basic framework.

In fairness, I’m not techie enough to know how to wrangle the Linux kernel such that my OS boots directly into a browser, but I’m sure other people are. And if I had a netbook, nothing would be stopping me from using one of the already available distros that do something similar. I think I just don’t see right now what Google could do, other than add their brand name to the project, that could truly revolutionise netbook computing. On the bright side, I’m guessing a LOT more users will be converted to Linux netbooks if Google throws their weight behind it – and as it will be open source, I’m sure it won’t take long for intrepid developers to fork it into all sorts of yummy variations.

I don’t really subscribe to the “Google is evil” theory, and I still feel that they have the potential and know-how to really pull out something brilliant, so… more of the waiting game for now, I guess. Right now, for the life of me, I can’t imagine what it could possibly be. This is probably why I don’t work for Google (creativity fail)!