I was in Bristol yesterday evening. I should, perhaps, have been at the County Ground to watch Somerset crush Gloucestershire in the first T20 match of the season, but instead I spent my time at Waterstones in the company of Ben Aaronovitch, Paul Cornell and Jasper Fforde.

Thanks to David Barnett’s fine Guardian article, we had an excellent crowd. At least 80 tickets were sold in advance, and there may have been more on the night. What’s more, lots of people bought books. Copies of The Severed Streets sold out. More of that later.

I know Paul very well, so I knew we’d be fine together. I’d not met Ben or Jasper before, though Paul knew Ben well from Doctor Who. (This is the first time I’d ever done a panel with two Doctor Who writers.) As it turned out, everyone got on very well, and we had a great panel. That is, the authors were all happy afterwards, and we’ve been getting some very positive feedback on Twitter. The store staff were very happy too.

I’m really pleased we got to do this, because for a long time I have been irritated by the way that conventions bring a host of big name writers into a city and then sequester them away in a hotel all weekend. The main reason for that, of course, is that convention staff are too busy with their own event to do outreach. Kudos to Crimefest for allowing BristolCon to do their outreach for them.

Thanks are also due to Pat Hawkes-Reed who provided some lovely cake for the evening.

I did record the event but I don’t know yet whether the audio will be usable. Fingers crossed. In the meantime here are a couple of bits of what may be news to most of you.

Firstly Ben will be writing some Rivers of London comics. As I understand it, the idea is to fill in some background around the series, rather than do adaptations of the novels, or new Peter Grant adventures. Ben and Paul, knowing each other from old, occasionally had a friendly dig at each other, the most obvious of which was when Ben declared that writing comics was easy. We shall see.

Paul’s announcement was that one of the characters in The Severed Streets is a writer of dark fictions called Neil Gaiman. I’ve just got to the point in the book where Neil is introduced, and I must say that Paul has got his speech patterns off pat. It remains to be seen what role he will play in the narrative, but those of you who have read Fallen London will understand what I mean that I say it is revealed that Neil moved to the US because he acquired the Sight. I understand that Amanda gets a mention in the book too, but doesn’t appear in person.

I should add that I was really impressed with Japser Fforde. Of course it helps that his books feature an independent Socialist Republic of Wales. Hopefully we’ll be able to lure him to BristolCon at some point.

My thanks once again to all involved, including the many people who came along to see the show. It was fun.