Space Lizards in Church

It was one of those Monday mornings when you find yourself in a church talking to 300 children about space lizards.

It was the first event of my author mini-tour for Space Lizards Stole My Brain! Three hundred kids from 9 different schools had squeezed into Christ Church in Wesham, Lancashire to hear me read from my novel and talk about writing comedy.  I could tell it was going to be a rather surreal event when I arrived at the church and found the shelves on either side of the altar were lined, not with hymn books, but with copies of Space Lizards.  It was hard not to imagine being on some weird alternate Earth where the dinosaurs had never died out and instead gone on to become Anglicans.

I clipped on my radio mic and waited in the wings (or should I say transept?) while the friendly lady vicar introduced me.  And then I was on, launching into my spiel.  I'd been nervous in the days leading up to the tour but once I was there, in front of an audience, the rehearsals I'd done paid off, and my brain clicked into automatic performance mode.  Being on tour, I realised, was fun!

After the reading there was a Q&A session, and then a signing in which I scribbled my increasingly wobbly signature into 200 books.  I am now something of an expert on popular first names for children aged 7 and 8 (there are an awful lot of Mollies and Charlies out there).

It was a marvellous, exciting, hilarious and very rewarding couple of hours, and left me feeling pretty exhausted.  I could have happily fallen asleep there in the church and snored away contentedly until evensong.  It was then that I remembered that this was not just the first event of the tour, it was the first event of that day and it was time to pack up and move on to the next one...