Summer and Autumn

Horrible day here. In the upper 80s. The air quality doesn’t look too bad – the sky at the horizon is not brown – but it smells terrible outside all the same. It always does once it gets this hot. Heated-up car exhaust, I assume. I don’t like summer much.

But never mind that. The Dictionary gets printed next week. Once that happens, you see, it will be a book. Rectangular thing, open on three sides, pages with printed words on them. Something one can hold in the hand. Something one can read more or less anywhere – on the bus, in the park, in the checkout line at the supermarket, on the treadmill. That’s much harder to do with a stack of pages open on all four sides, a stack that can blow all over the room if a breeze comes in the window. No doubt that’s why some clever inventor thought of binding – fastens the thing down, you see, and makes it easy to turn the pages without making a mess. Wonderful invention, books.

I know, you’re thinking I’m very naive and fatuous, going on and on about one little old book. All very well for you, of course, you write books every day, but it’s all new to me. Well plus there’s the fact that I am naive and fatuous, of course; that has something to do with it.

So it will be printed and then before long it will be published, and then you will be able to read it. I’ll sign your copy for you if you like. I might zoom over to London when it comes out, just so that I can jump up and down and squeal and generally act like a fool. I might as well, after all, because it’s not as if I’m not one. The weather will be cooler by then, too.

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