I spent most of yesterday in Bristol, doing radio at Ujima and then hosting a reading by Emma Newman and Jo Hall.

The radio stuff ended up being not much about books, but was fun all the same. As a women’s issues show, we devoted most of the episode to themes connected with International Women’s Day. I got the crew to discuss this story about how women have moved to the left of men in UK politics, which I found quite interesting.

There are no downloads available for this week and last week’s shows as yet. There’s been some sort of tech screw-up with the Ujima website, and no one seems to know how the system works. I’m going to try to apply my awesome hacker skills to the problem. 😉

In the evening we did the Word of Mouth reading at the Thunderbolt on Bath Road. It’s a lovely little pub, with a great live music program as well as monthly literary events. Tír na nÓg are playing there next week, but I just can’t afford the time to go. Our reading gig went very well, and I thoroughly enjoyed MCing the event. My thanks to Dave, the landlord, Richard of Tangent Books who runs the readings series, and of course to Emma and Jo for being awesome.

And having been up early, out all day, and home stupidly late, I’m now knackered. It is becoming increasingly obvious that I have too many commitments and am not doing any of them well enough. Some sort of weeding out is necessary. I’m going to have to bail on Kiev because I can’t afford the time or effort required to organize the trip. Ã…con and Finncon are, of course, firmly nailed down, as are BristolCon and World Fantasy. I won’t be at Eastercon, and even though I bought a membership to Nine Worlds I’m not sure I’ll go. Top of my list at the moment for additional trips is the academic conference in Liverpool in June, but that’s the weekend before Finncon so I’m already dreading the exhaustion that will result.

Right now, however, I need to get back to running a publishing company and a bookstore. It is, after all, World Book Day. Stand by for book-related bloggage.