To London, to London, jiggity-jig

I keep winding up in London, unintentionally, for purposes that are not entirely work-related. Not that I'm complaining.

Monday was a double-barreled trip, in that I had the early afternoon to find an accountant - my housemate says 'find' is the wrong verb, because they don't grow like mushrooms in the forest to be picked willy-nilly by passersby, but what does he know - and the evening to find a particular little subterranean bar in Soho where Windmill was throwing wine at its 2014 novelists. Neither of which are particularly daunting, unless you feel like an impostor and keep expecting someone to send you to play with the finger-paints until nap time.

"Finding an accountant" consisted of getting lost in a dodgier-looking part of Camden for a good half-hour, then having the reincarnation of Winston Churchill repeatedly explain that I need a national insurance number and everything I spend money on regularly is tax deductible. My family keeps trying to pass me on to accountants that they know socially, but the one thing that the professors at the UEA have not hedged on recommending is finding someone that specializes in writers and other creatives that are horrible at numbers - while I was sitting in the reception area, a woman wearing an expensive wool birds nest as a dress came in and left two shopping bags full of receipts and other papers and said, "see you next quarter!" while walking out.

And the Windmill Party - publishers, publicists, sales people, agents, Waterstones representatives, and a smattering of rather shy authors in a tiny bar decorated with next year's paperbacks. The decor was functional - five of the authors whose books had been scattered on the tables, shelves, and mantlepiece read during the evening. At first, people picked up the books, flicked through them, and put them down carefully before determining that no one was looking and sliding them subtly into handbags. Then Jason stood up and invited everyone to take as many as they wanted - and the vultures descended. My picture of the London publishing scene now consists of very well dressed people, wine glasses in hand, jumping over each other to get unedited proof copies of next year's books and cramming as many as they could fit into their bags - Windmill brought tote bags for everyone, it was that kind of event. A bit like a strip club for bibliophiles, except you got to take the girls home afterwards.

Besides the oodles of free books, the gallons of free wine, standing next to Sebastian Faulks and hearing Nick Harkaway read from Angelmaker (it is goooooooooood, trust me), my high point of the evening was meeting David Vann.

This bears explanation.

David Vann wrote Legend of a Suicide, a collection of short stories and a novella that explore some very concentrated territory that you might be able to guess from the title; what you probably won't be able to guess (spoiler) from the title is that the book contains about one hundred pages of a man dragging the decomposing body of his dead son through the Alaskan wilderness. Short stories are not meant to be consumed in marathon sittings. Short stories about suicide, probably even more so. Legends was a set text for Theory and Practice of Fiction last year, so (surprise!) I read it in a week, and then spent the next few months trying to cope with what I read.

So, when I found out that he was at the party, I went and found him, and told him that I would never forgive him for that book. And then we talked about Medea adaptations and castration in fiction. He's pretty cool.