There’s a little shorthand I have with my editor. I imagine it’s a common thing. It’s a bit long-winded to refer to a book by it’s full title all the time, especially if you’re exchanging mails about several at once, so I tend to abbreviate them. The Warlock’s Shadow becomes TWS, The Adamantine Palace becomes TAP and so forth. I imagine this sort of thing goes on all the time with authors and their agents and editors; it certainly does in engineering, where it’s generally considered bad form if you haven’t replaced at least half the full words in any mail, memo or customer document with their TLA [1] equivalent.

Just to be clear, then, correct short form for the Order of the Scales is OOTS. It is not TOOTS. Do you call The Order of the Stick TOOTS? No, you do not. Do you refer to anything at all to do with dragons as “TOOTS”? Not if you don’t want to be burned and eaten. OOTS, right. Are you listening? you know who you are.

Anyway, this was supposed to be a quick note about signing appearances. Just needed to vent there for a moment. Forthcoming opportunities to acquired signed copies of OOTS-without-a-leading-T are as follows:

As part of the Chainsaw Gang I’ll be doing a signing session at Redbridge Library on 21st May, 2-3pm.

I’ll be at the Centre of the Universe Writtle Library on 4th June, 2.30pm

I’ll be at Alt.Fiction on 25th-26th June

Oh, and some little thing at Heffers in Cambridge on Wednesday 11th May, 6:30-8:30. First chance to buy copies of Order of the Scales. One or two other authors may be present, although as far as I know, neither China Mieville, Steve Erikson, Peter Hamilton, Trudi Canavan, Alex Scarrow, Ian Whates, Paul Stewart, Chris Riddell, Jasper Kent, Philip Reeve, Moira Young or Sophia McDougall have written about dragons. But I don’t know that for sure, so don’t write them off. And maybe Krakens count? Also a few of them may have won an award or two…

[1] If you don’t know what that means, you’re not a software engineer.

[1] OK, Three Letter Acronym. We have E(xtended)TLAs as well. And ETLAG(losarries) too. And probably, once you’re a name-level ninja in the business, JETLAG too.