Iain: Hello friend. Oh, it’s been a busy summer. We’ve been getting Sam Applewhite Book 6, Jaegermax, ready for publication (pre-order your copy now!). And the audiobook of Book 4, Tigerheart, has just come out, again narrated by the excellent Matthew Lloyd Davies.

Heide: And we’ve started on Clovenhoof Book 9! How exciting.

Iain: We’ve also been busy because at the beginning of the month, our writing fame —

Heide: Fame! Ha!

Iain: Okay, our vague familiarity among certain people. It led us to be invited to an event in Lithuania.

Heide: Yes, we were invited as guests of Litunanicon, a genre convention held in Vilnius. It seemed like a really fun thing to do.

Iain: We took our respective spouses along, although going on a weekend trip to a convention doesn’t count as a “holiday” in some people’s eyes. Tut.

Heide: Doesn’t it? At the airport, we all played Ryanair roulette, which is the game where you try to get through the check-in process without accidentally spending more money to check in an extra bag or pick a seat and then we took off.  But then, about an hour into the flight somebody was taken ill. 

Iain: I was sat way back and just heard the announcement to passengers asking if there is a doctor on board. 

Heide: Someone came forward and helped.

Iain: Actually, it seemed the doctor spent most of his time trying to prove that he was REALLY a doctor and not some over-enthusiastic liar. 

Heide: And the plane was then diverted to Poznan in Poland so that the patient could get to an ambulance. He walked off the plane, so we really hope that his outcome was a good one. 

Iain: I was googling where to visit in Poznan if we had to stay the night. 

Heide: The crew had lots of paperwork to do and a new flight plan to file, so we were there for another hour or so, but everyone was very good-natured because of the nature of the emergency. We eventually landed in Vilnius after midnight and our host Kasytis had stayed up so that he could collect us and drop us off at the hotel.

Iain: Kastytis was the guy who’d originally invited us to the convention. Turns out someone had read and liked our Oddjobs books sufficiently to think we were worth inviting to an international convention.

Heide: The next day was the day of the convention. We had the morning free.  Vilnius is such a lovely city and very pleasant to walk around. We found some sculptures in the grounds of the Modern Art Museum which were lots of fun.

Iain: You mean someone messed about and took silly photos among them.

Heide: Ahem. After a taste of the city we made our way to Litunanicon. It was based in a university building, gloriously airy and sleek. Cardboard cut-outs greeted us near the entrance. It turns out locals had so frequently asked if George RR Martin, Neil Gaiman or Margaret Atwood could come to the convention, the organisers decided they would have to be there in paper-based spirit instead.

Iain: They were VERY keen for Neil Gaiman to be a future guest. We spent quite a while discussing how they could make that a reality in the future.

Heide: The programming for the convention was in Lithuanian only to begin with. Ben Aaranovitch was the first part of the English programming. 

Iain: I mean, he’s a proper “author”. His Rivers of London books are great stories and much loved.

 Heide: We had met Ben at breakfast in the hotel and exchanged a few words. His event was an interview, and he was funny and charming. We were the next item on the agenda, and we had a presentation entitled Hidden Spaces and Hidden Creatures. The theme for the whole convention was Cities, so we wanted to talk about the way that we used the city of Birmingham in our Oddjobs series. Iain did the first part of the talk and related some of the amazing hidden spaces in Birmingham. 

Iain: Heide did the second part of the talk and described how we tried to fake a monster sighting by making a giant tentacle to photograph in Birmingham’s canals. By taking up way too much suitcase space, Heide had brought along the tentacle itself, which raised a laugh. 

Heide: We then gave it away to a member of the audience.

Iain: Seriously, that tentacle was the star of the show. We should take more tentacles abroad.

Heide: Sunday turned out to be wet, but nevertheless we went out exploring. We particularly wanted to see Lukiškės prison which featured in Stranger Things series 4. 

Iain: Yep, the Russian prison Hopper tries to escape from is an actual real prison in a former Soviet state. Who knew?

Heide: We then went on to the nearby Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights (in the former KGB headquarters), which was fascinating and very sobering.

Iain: Our wonderful host Kastytis took us on a tour of the old town. We saw the grand buildings around the cathedral square, caught the funicular railway up to Gediminas Castle — we always enjoy a funicular — and walked down the slippery cobblestones to return to the bottom. We saw the fun bohemian area known as Užupis, which has been evolved by local artists and humorously declared as a republic, with its own constitution.

Heide: We finished at a pub where we met up with a book group who had read Oddjobs. It was a small group but we had a great discussion and some fine Lithuanian food. 

Iain: I ate Witch’s Tears.

Heide: What’s that?

Iain: I… don’t know. I think it was a sort of cheesy chili con carne. Maybe the beans were the tears.

Heide: Did we ever find out which person in Lithuania had read our books and caused us to be invited there?

Iain: I don’t believe we did…

More pictures from our Lithuanian adventures can be found on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/GoodyandGrant/