Well that’s it for another year. My appearances at the 2011 Edinburgh International Book Festival are done and dusted.

This was my second year at the festival, and this year I was taking part in two events, instead of one. Yesterday I spoke to an audience of around 200 from four or five different schools. They’d all come to hear me talk about Invisible Fiends, but they got more than they bargained for when MY FEET EXPLODED as I stepped on stage.

OK, they didn’t quite explode, but they did go bang several times. Apparently whoever had been on stage before me was doing some sort of science display, and they’d accidentally left some explosive powder scattered around. It would’ve made for an impressive entrance, had I not instantly started crying the moment the bangs began. And then loudly soiled myself.

A couple of days prior to that, I took part in a horror panel event with Darren Shan and Alexander Gordon Smith. The tall and bearded Philip Ardagh was chairing the event, and it was great fun to bounce ideas and thoughts off one another up there on the stage. It was my first ever event in the main tent, too, which was nice.

Signing after the horror panel

Afterwards we had a joint signing, which I fully expected to be thoroughly depressing. Darren, of course, draws huge queues and has a very dedicated fan base, so both Gordon and I expected to be sitting twiddling our thumbs as everyone lined up to get Darren’s signature.

As luck would have it, though, we did get quite a lot of people looking to get their books signed, and we almost – almost – held our own with Darren. Of course, next day Darren was signing for several more hours after his two-hour Saga of Darren Shan event, but I’m not going to dwell on that. Much.

And someone made him a cake in the shape of a human head. No-one has ever made me a cake in the shape of a human head.

I was only in Edinburgh for three days, but I loved every minute of it. As well as the events and signings, I managed to get several thousand words of my new book written. That means there’s a chance – a slim one – that I might even finish it by the 1st of October deadline.

After finding a comment from children’s author Philip Ardagh on one of my earlier posts, I popped by his site to take a look.  Not literally, obviously.  I don’t live inside the internet, despite what my immediate family may suspect.  For those of you who don’t know, Philip is the author of – among others – the Eddie Dickens Trilogy.  I quite recently read Awful End, the first in the trilogy, and really enjoyed it.

Perhaps even more marginally less impressively, Philip joins me as one of the authors who provided short stories for Wow! 366. 

You may recall that recently I mentioned I appear to be story 364 of 366, right next to Tom from McFly.  Well Philip, it seems, has discovered that Scholastic were unable to find 366 contributors in the short timescale they had available.  As such there are only 270 stories in the book.

Which begs the question, how can I be story 364 of 270?  I didn’t pay all that much attention in maths, but I’m reasonably confident that within the realms of current human understanding, such a situation can not occur.

It’ll be interesting to see where I appear when the book is published in August.

Okay, not that interesting, but a bit.