Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

Dinner with Steven Moffat in Bar Shu, spent mostly in enthusiastic Dr Who neepery. I love my life....As a side note, running Windows Vista on the Panasonic w7 is making me really nostalgic for 1986. Whoever thought I'd get to type things then stare at a blank screen for a bit and one-by-one watch the letters appear? Cory and Mike's 'Why Don't You Run Linux?' talks are staring to seem much more sensible.

I loved the fact that I was suddenly no longer dependent on whether a store took out an ad in the right place, or on the word on the street.

What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything.

There was a smile dancing on his lips, although it was a wary smile, for the world is a bigger place than a little graveyard on a hill; and there would be dangers in it and mysteries, new friends to make, old friends to rediscover, mistakes to be made and many paths to be walked before he would, finally, return to the graveyard or ride with the Lady on the broad back of her great grey stallion.

Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they're on a tour.

You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director. They think maybe you’re scouting for business.