Jasper Fforde

Mostly- notes for Jennifer and Colleen, who I have yet to speak to. Can I start out with I totally love that man! I really wonder though what goes on in his head. But here's some news.

He's got a book coming out every year running up till 2014. Another nursery crime book, some top secret book of 2012.. but no news on Shades of Grey 2. FYI.

Random funnies:

*Whenever someone in a book hits the snooze button, the reader is forced to go to sleep and a kitten in the book world dies,.. which means every time you go to sleep while reading, a harmless kitten is dying. Hey, I didn't make the rules...

*Mangos are funny, oranges aren't.. in the same way that banana's are funny and parsnips aren't.

*He has a list of silly things that he thinks could potentially be funny names. His mother says "thursday next" and that's where our gal, Thursday comes from.

*When he goes to restaurants and the waitress asks if he has any questions, he responds with-

yes, why is it that orange jam is called marmalade?

why is it that Chewbacca is the only one in the end that doesn't get a metal of honor?

*Pickwick the dodo was originally a cat named Elmo until he went to a museaum and they had a big stuffed dodo. He went to the gift shop asking if they had a dodo reengineering kit.

*Everyone chooses sides between Bronte and Austen. He grew up in a Bronte home, and the Bennet sisters are a bit drippy.

*He throws stuff in books that are funny puns that you don't actually get until later... You've been punned by stealth.

*Most of his writing comes from a narrative dare. Here's a situation that you put a character in and you have to dig them out of it. Which is really how the Eyre Affair came to be. What if Jane Eyre got kidnapped...

An example to the narrative dare:

You look out the window one day and you see a gorilla in a tree. How do you get him out? Well, you remember that earlier that week you got a flier for a gorilla removing service and you give them a call. A man shows up and says that bananas will do the trick but that the gorilla could become violent. He says he will go pick up bananas while you stay with the hostile gorilla. No, no, you say. You will go get the bananas. You leave and come back with the bananas and your house has been ransacked and everything is gone. You call the police and they come around telling you that there has been a lot of this going around, and that they've been trying to catch the gang that's doing this. Oh, the man, you ask. No, the gorilla. The man's just the accomplice, but they need to speak to the gorilla about tax fraud.