I'm Coming to London! and Other Ramblings...

Hey all! OK, what ramblings do I have for you today? Other than I'm *this close* to being finished the massive project I was working on and cannot WAIT to see the finished product?!

How about this? A book I've been working on for the past year is out, and the man who wrote it will be doing a book tour through the US, Canada, and the UK. His name is Sam Cutler, and he was the tour manager for the Rolling Stones during their ill-fated 1969 tour... the one that began with the Hyde Park show that became a memorial to Brian Jones, and ended in the disaster of Altamont. Sam was the guy behind all of it, and the stories he tells in this book are rollicking, vivid, and amazing. After Altamont, when he was left behind to clean up the mess, he jumped ship and became the touring manager for the Grateful Dead, and he's got some great stories about Jimi, Janis, and the Dead and what THAT was like. He's lived about six lifetimes in one, and most of them are in the pages of this book. So check it out!! (And Sam was an absolute joy to work with... what a lot of fun that book was!) The book is called You Can't Always Get What You Want: My Life with the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead and Other Wonderful Reprobatesand you can click on the link to order it.

Hmm... what else. Oh, I'm going to be at Huron College talking about being a writer, and then talking specifically about Lost, in London Ontario on Wednesday, March 31 (i.e. THIS WEDNESDAY) at 6pm. I'll be talking for about an hour. I hope you can make it!! Please please pass on the message to other Lost fans in London and southwestern Ontario, and I would LOVE to meet you if you're there so please come up and talk to me afterwards if you come. If you happen to be in London and have some free time, Brian Francis, the author of Fruit (the runner-up to the 2009 Canada Reads competition) will be there talking at noon. His readings are SO funny you won't want to miss them. I'll be there at that, but in another room for most of it because I have to do the Globe chat at exactly the same time. But I'll be trying to duck in and out to hear it.

My dear friend Chris, who I did my Masters in English with (and we basically stood in the halls every day before class speaking entirely in Simpsons... we bonded over our mutual TV geekdom) is now a professor out east, and he's written this amazing blog entry today about why terrorism is a topic that's not covered in film very much, but is covered in all kinds of television, and he's wondering why that is. Go and check out his argument and leave your own ideas.

And finally, I urge you to head over to the comments on the blog post I wrote about the Lost Series Finale title, and check out the discussion between Jen and Fred. It's fascinating!! Thanks for keeping that going, guys... I've loved reading it.