I have met some readers!  Last Wednesday I visited the children’s book club at the Studio City Library near where I live. I had spoken with Barbara, the fabulous librarian, a number of times and she had asked if I’d like her to ask some questions to get the ball rolling or if I wanted to just leave it to the kids.  I was afraid of one of those difficult silences where everyone stares at everyone else and no one knows quite what to say, but I needn’t have worried.  The girls were absolutely brimming with questions and comments about the book and we had a great conversation about the book, ghost stories, oracles and everything.

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An interview that I did with Sarah from Park Ridge Public Library in Park Ridge, IL, has just gone up. You can find it at the library’s “Books We Love” site here.  As usual, I yack on quite a bit.  Sometimes there’s just no shutting me up!

It was fun to do, though, and even better because I discovered someone else who likes old cookbooks.

Well, the hols are officially over and so I’ve applied nose to grindstone and posted a new blog on the Tor.com site.  It’s called “Read Like A Child.” Please have a look and let me know what you think!

Here’s hoping that 2010 will be a wonderful year for everyone. This is Zulu the kitten demonstrating the best method of relaxing as we launch into a new decade (well, not a new decade mathematically, but you get what I mean).

The sequel to “Spellbinder” was officially accepted by Feiwel & Friends last week.  Hooray!  The next step is copyediting, which is where incredibly detail-oriented people scour the manuscript for spelling mistakes, iffy grammar and suchlike. It’s really interesting to see how many they find, no matter how much you think you’ve checked.

The title (at the moment) is “The Queen of the Abyss,” which the US seems to like but Macmillan UK don’t.  (Groan.)  I really want this book to have the same title everywhere, so some compromise is probably in order.  For now, though, I have to get started on book three…

I have signed books!  I fretted about it all week and then everything went like clockwork.  Hooray!

I planned on arriving at Chevalier’s Books half an hour early to give myself time to set up my candy cauldrons and Parma Violets, but of course I got to Larchmont Blvd. a full hour ahead of time.  I couldn’t go in that early, so I drove around the neighborhood for thirty minutes (there are some huge houses around there). By the time  I got back, parked the car and hauled my bags and boxes into the shop I was really nervous but Norman Dixon and everyone else at Chevalier’s couldn’t have been nicer.  The table was right at the front of the shop, so I put the cauldrons next to the window where they could be seen from the street.  I wasn’t sure whether I should sit down right away, but Barbara the storyteller came and chatted and asked me to sign a copy for her granddaughter and her new puppy, so that got things off to a good start.

As soon as eleven o’clock rolled around, the people I had emailed about the event started to arrive (hooray!).  They bought books and stood around near the table, talking and laughing for the whole two hours.  At first I was concerned that the store might not like that, but Norman said it was exactly what they wanted.  My friend Judy stopped everyone who came in and told them all about the book and steered them toward the table — she even went outside and accosted people in the street, asking them if they had children and if so how old they were.  And it worked!  People came in, looked at the books, chatted…and then bought them.  One lady only came in because she saw the cauldrons.  She was impressed that I’d made the cakes and put the whole thing together and she bought a book too.  Some people bought three!

It was lots of fun and at the end of it Chevalier’s had sold all but five of their copies of Spellbinder, so I signed those for them and toddled off across the road to have lunch at Le Petit Greek (I love Greek food).

My next signing is in two weeks and you’ll never guess where.  Clue: it involves traveling by air and being really cold.

But more on that later!

My first book signing is next week!  On Halloween, appropriately enough.  For those of you who live withing hailing distance of Los Angeles, it is at Chevalier’s Books on Larchmont. The full address is 126 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90004 and the phone number is 323-465-1334. I’ll be there from 11am until 1pm, so please come — I have visions of myself sitting all alone with a stack of books!

And it won’t just be books — there will also be a big bowl of Parma Violets (Belladonna’s favourites)!  Well, there will be if I don’t eat them all between now and Halloween…

I love cooking. And even more than that, I love the history of food and cooking. And, of course, I love books. All of which means that I collect old cook books (mostly pre-1890) and read them cover to cover. Sometimes I even have a go at some of the recipes, though there’s generally quite a bit of guesswork involved in that as most of them don’t use measurements.

So the other day I was leafing through Soyer’s Modern Housewife (1851), a book of “Nearly One Thousand Receipts.” It was written by Alexis Soyer, a French chef who worked in England, primarily at the Reform Club in London (yes, the same Reform Club that features in Jules Verne’s Around the World In 80 Days). Soyer was an innovator who came up with many concepts that we now take for granted, like cooking with gas, refrigerators and ovens with adjustable temperatures. In addition to all of this, he wanted to widen the horizons of British housewives and teach them how to cook properly.

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