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.