Raided!/Landlord surprise/Taking the show on the road

I bought more WiFi on the coach, but there was something wrong with it. I couldn't access Confusing Peach or any of the secret sites that lived inside of it --they just timed out. And two of the webmail accounts I used were also kaput, along with the voice mail site I liked. I poked around and decided that the censorwall on the bus-company's Internet had been updated with a particularly large and indiscriminate blacklist, so I tried some proxies I knew, but they didn't help. I folded away my laptop and looked at the motorway zipping past, the dark night and the raindrops on the window, hoping for sleep or at least some kind of traveler's trance, but my mind kept going back to the soap in the bathroom, my dad's sad, missing teeth, my mum's sagging skin and hollow, wet eyes.

I had the seat to myself, so I took out my mobile and called 26. I'd sent her a steady stream of texts from my parents' place, until she'd sent me back a stern message telling me to stop worrying about her and pay attention to my family, damn it. But I'd missed her fearsomely, with a pang like a toothache, and now that I was headed home -- ha! London was home now, there was a turn-up for the books! -- I found myself trembling with anticipation of having her next to me, spooned up against her on my bed on the floor of the Zeroday, my face buried in the fragrant skin where her neck became her shoulder.

“Cecil?” she said. “Have you heard?” Her voice was tight, hushed.

“Heard what?”

“They've raided Confusing Peach. Took all the servers right out of the rack.”

“What?”

“They went at it like cave-men with stone axes! Took two hundred machines down -- there's thousands of sites offline!”

I felt the blood drain all the way to the soles of my feet. There were any number of reasons I could think of for the coppers to go after Confusing Peach -- the drugs, the parties -- but the timing of the raid made me think that this had more to do with our screening, and all the coverage it had garnered. Sam Brass from the MPA had looked like he was ready to blow a gasket before; now that I was on the front of the paper exhorting people to violate copyright, he must be in full-on volcano mode.

“Why'd they do it?”

26 sighed and didn't say anything and I knew that I was right.

“It should be okay,” she said. I couldn't figure out what she meant -- how could it be okay? The sites that we used as our hubs and gathering place were down, and so were all those other sites. “I mean, the Confusing Peach people always said they kept the logs encrypted, and flushed them every two days in any event. And the main databases were all encrypted -- remember last year when there were all those server crashes because of the high load from the encryption, and they were doing all that begging for us to send them money for an upgrade?”

I did remember it. I hadn't thought much about it at the time, just been annoyed. But now I knew what 26 meant when she said it was okay. She meant that they wouldn't be able to use the Confusing Peach logs to figure out who we all were, where we all lived, what we were all up to.

I'd never given much thought to encryption, for all that I'd used it every day since I was a little kid putting together my first private laptop drives. Depending on how you looked at it, the theory was either very simple or incomprehensibly hard. The simple way of looking at it was that encryption systems were black boxes that took your files and turned them into perfectly unscramble-able gibberish that only you could gain access to. But, of course, I knew that it was a lot more complicated than that: crypto wasn't a perfect and infallible black box, it was an insanely complicated set of mathematical proofs and implementation details that were incredibly hard to get right.

The news was always full of stories about banking security systems, smart cards, ATM records, and all manner of other sensitive information leaking out because someone had done the maths wrong, or forgot to turn off the debugging mode that dropped an unscram- bled copy of everything into a maintenance file. After all, that's what Aziz relied on, wasn't it? Badly done crypto rendering beautiful bits of kit illegal or unusable?

And that was just the start of the problem when it came to crypto. Even assuming the programmers got it all right, then you had to deal with the users, idiots like me who just wanted to get on with the job and not get hassled by having to remember long, complicated passwords and that. So we used short passwords that were easy to guess -- especially for a computer. We refused to run the critical software updates because we were too busy. We visited dodgy websites with our unpatched browsers and caught awful viruses that snooped on our crap passwords. It doesn't matter how great the bank-safe is if the banker uses 000 for a combination and forgets to lock the door half the time.

So maybe it was okay for us. Maybe Confusing Peach didn't have any readable logs or databases of users and messages. Maybe all that happened is that the poor admins who ran it -- a group of University of Nottingham physics students who'd been handing the admin duties on to younger students since before I was born -- were now missing all their computers and answering hard questions in some police station basement.

But I didn't think we should count on it.

“When did this all happen?”

“Just now,” she said. “Midnight raid. They didn't even wait for the building maintenance people to let them into the server cages: they just cut through them with torches. Brought in camera crews and everything. It's all over the news. The Motion Picture Association spokesman called it a 'major victory against piracy and theft.'”

I swallowed again. “I am a total cock-up,” I said. “God, what have I done?”

“Trent McCauley,” she said sharply. I sat to attention. She had never called me by my real full name. “Stop it, this instant. This is not the time to wallow in self-pity, idiot boy. You didn't do anything -- we did it. I was putting on Pirate Cinemas before I even met you, remember? You're not our leader, you fool -- you're one of us, and we're all in this together. So stop putting on airs and taking credit for everything that we've all done, right now.”

I opened and shut my mouth like a fish. “Twenty,” I said at last. “I'm not saying that --”

“Yes, you are, whether or not you mean to. You need to get over feeling responsible for everyone and everything that goes on and realize that we're all in this together.”

“I hate it when you're right,” I said. “I know. Apologize now.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Right, doesn't that feel better?”

It did. “Okay, boss. Now what do we do?”

“Come back to London and we'll figure it out.”

I took night buses from Victoria to 26's house, creeping across dark London, seeing it again with new eyes though I'd only been gone for a day. Everyone and everything seemed so strange -- big, menacing, mysterious. I felt paranoid, didn't want to get my laptop out in case someone robbed me for it. London didn't feel like home anymore, but neither did Bradford -- I guess that meant that I was genuinely homeless.

I texted 26 when I was outside her place and she silently opened the door for me. She led me up the dark stairs, past her parents' bedroom, and into her room. We kissed for a long time, like we'd been apart for a hundred years. Then I slid in between the sheets beside her and cuddled up to her from behind. Her hair tickled my nose, but I didn't mind. Had I thought that I had no home? Of course I did: wherever 26 was, that was home.

In the morning, I got up and unfolded my laptop. 26 was still spark out, snoring like the world's cutest band-saw, and I did what I always did first, hit Confusing Peach and began to read through the message-boards, ping my mates, clear my queue of tweets and mails and that.

I was at it for ten minutes before I realized that I was using Confusing Peach, which meant that it wasn't down anymore! I skipped up to the front door of the site, to the announcements section I generally ignored, and found a proud message from one of Peach's overseas admins, who boasted about how she and the Nottingham physics students had prepared for a raid years ago, building in redundant mirrors in three different countries (though she didn't say which, and my IP trace did something funny I'd never seen before, bouncing back and forth between three routers -- one in Sweden, one in Poland, and one in Macedonia -- without seeming to resolve to any one machine).

I shook 26's shoulder, then shook it again when she swatted at my hand. “Wake up,” I hissed. “Come on, wake up.”

She sat up, pulling the sheet over her, and nestled her chin in my neck, peering over my shoulder. “What?”

“Look,” I said, showing her the message.

“Holy cats,” she said. “Genius! What a bunch of absolute nerds. They must have had such a fun time playing superspy and setting up all those fail-overs and mirrors. I guess that means that we can probably trust their crypto, too.” She kissed my earlobe. “See? A night's sleep fixes everything.”

Downstairs, I could hear her parents finishing their breakfast. “What time is your first class?” I said.

She yawned and looked at her phone, beside the bed. “I've got an hour,” she said. “Plenty of time. Come on, let's eat.”

I'd spent the night at her's a few times, but I'd always waited until her parents left for work before skulking downstairs. Something about confronting them across the breakfast table -- even if 26 and I hadn't been having it off the night before, it was still too weird.

“Is it okay?” I said.

“Come on, chicken,” she said, and tossed me my jeans and a T-shirt of mine she'd worn home one night. I tugged it over my head, reveling in how it smelled of her.

Her parents were dressed already, and they were wrestling one another for space for their newspapers at the book-crowded table, drinking cups of coffee from a big press-pot and eating toast out of a tarnished toast-rack. Pots of jam and Marmite and various other spreads teetered on the book-piles.

They looked at me when I came in, muttered “Morning,” and went back to their papers. 26 gave them each a peck on the top of the head, poured us each an enormous cup of coffee (finishing the pot), and piled the remaining toast on a plate that she handed to me, then rummaged through the fridge for cheese and juice and three kinds of fruit and yogurt. Her mum quirked an eyebrow at her and muttered something about teenaged metabolisms and bottomless appetites and 26 stuck her tongue out.

“We're inside-out with hunger, Mum!”

Her dad laughed. “I see you've deployed the auxiliary breakfast stomachs,” he said. “Go on, eat.”

We pigged out, and 26's parents showed one another (and us) bits from the paper, and I made another pot of coffee -- it wasn't bad, though it wasn't a patch on the stuff Jem made -- and then 26 looked at her phone and yelped and announced she was late for class and dashed upstairs, leaving me alone with her parents. She was back down in a flash, dressed, a toothbrush in her mouth. She spat toothpaste in the kitchen sink, dropped the toothbrush in one of the coffee cups, and kissed us each before charging out the door.

I'd almost forgot I was eating breakfast with my girlfriend's parents, but now it was as awkward as an awkward thing. I got up and began to wash up the breakfast dishes, but 26's mum said, “We've got a dishwasher, Cecil, no need for that.”

Durr. I began to stack the dishes in the dishwasher, trying to project an air of responsi- ble goodness. 26's father cleared his throat and said, “What are your intentions for my daughter, young man?” in a stern voice.

I turned around, feeling like I'd been caught in a horror film. He was absolutely poker- faced, no trace at all of his affable, absent normal expression. I remembered that he was a high-powered barrister by day. Then he burst out laughing.

“Oh, son, you should see your face! Christ on a bike, you looked like you thought I was going to go and get my shotgun!”

26's mum rolled up her newspaper and hit him on the back of the head several times with it. “Rosh, that was very cruel.”

He waved her off. “Oh, our Cecil here is a fighter. I'm sure he'd have survived.” She swatted him again. “Oh, okay, fine. Sorry, Cecil. I just wanted to tell you that, well, we like you. You don't need to tiptoe around us when you're here. 26 has told us a little about you, and it sounds like you've had some bad breaks. We saw your picture in the papers, you know, and 26 showed us your film. It was cacking good stuff, too! 26 hasn't always had the best taste in boys, but you're doing very well for yourself, so far. In any event, you needn't skulk around like a thief when you stay over.”

I was at a total loss for words. That might have just been the nicest thing anyone ever said to me. I smiled awkwardly and said, “Thank you,” then fished around, and said, “you know, thank you. A lot.” Not my finest moment, but it seemed to satisfy 26's father. I had a thought, as long as we were all getting along so well. “Can I ask you something?”

He made a go-ahead gesture.

“What's her real name?”

He snorted and 26's mum started to stay something, but he hushed her. “I'm afraid I've been sworn to confidentiality on that score. It's true that 26 isn't the name we gave her at birth, but she chose it for herself very early, and to be honest, it's what we've always called her. I expect she'll change it by deed poll sooner or later.”

I escaped from the kitchen after shaking both their hands (her mum even gave me a little, but warm, hug), got dressed and showered and slipped out the door and went home to the Zeroday.

I climbed the fire-escape and slipped through the window, dropped my bag off in my room, and headed downstairs. There were voices in the pub-room, some I didn't recognize, and one I hadn't heard in quite some time.

I came into the room to find Chester and Rabid Dog sat on the sofa with their arms folded, looking worried, Jem perched on the arm, and sitting on the bar was the speaker, whose voice I hadn't heard in months and months: it was Dodger!

I almost didn't recognize him at first. He'd cut his hair, and while he was still wearing jeans and work-boots, they were clean and free from holes, and his boots actually gleamed in the pub lights.

Standing beside him was a young man in a smart jumper and a little narrow-brim pork-pie hat and expensive trainers -- your basic Bow hipster -- watching it all with an intent, keen look.

Everyone turned to look at me when I came in. I waved -- “Hi, hi,” I said. “Dodger, mate, where've you been? Nice hair!”

He grunted and waved at me. “Cecil,” he said, “meet Mr. Thistlewaite,” he said, gesturing at the hipster, who waved back and said, “Call me Rob.”

“Hi, Rob.”

Jem turned to me. “Dodger was just explaining how Mr. Thistlewaite has this incredible offer for us all.”

“Oh, yes?”

Dodger shook his head. “Jem, listen to me, will you? Before you come to conclu- sions?”

Jem folded his arms again.

“Right,” Dodger said. “Right. Okay. Here's the story. Rob here is a property developer, specialized in derelict buildings.”

I started to see why everyone else was looking so upset.

“What he does, right, is he buys them off the council or whomever for cheap and does them up when he can, and sells 'em off. But when he gets one like this, in a neighborhood that's too crap to sell anything in, he likes to wait for a while, cos there's no sense in spending a lot of money doing a place up if no one wants to live in it.”

“I figure if a place is cheap enough now, I'll have a flutter on it, put some money down, wait and see if the neighborhood improves.” Rob didn't seem to be embarrassed to be talking about how much money he had, which was unusual. I knew lots of hipsters were rich, but I didn't think most of them could talk casually about buying and selling whole buildings.

“Right. So Rob here reckons that Bow is going to come up nice, and so he's bought this place.”

That was quite an announcement. I could tell that he'd already got that far with the other lads, and this certainly explained why they were looking so murderous.

“You working for landlords now, Dodger?” Jem said. “You show him which places to buy, grass out your old mates, sell our homes out from under us?”

Dodger shook his head. “That's the part you're not getting, Jem. Listen, okay? Just listen. Yeah, I give Rob help finding good places to buy. All the best places are squatted, cos we're all so clever about finding them, yeah? But a place like this, Rob doesn't want to do it up any time soon -- it's going to take years before this dump is worth anything. And in the meantime, you get to live here.”

That got our attention.

“Yeah,” he said. “Right. Rob wants to know that there's someone responsible living here, that it's not being used as a sugar shack or for tarts to turn tricks, that no stupid kids are going to burn it down cooking rock. He wants you to be tenants.”

Jem still looked suspicious. “Don't tenants pay rent?”
“I'm only after peppercorn rent,” Rob said. “A pound a year.”

“Yeah,” Dodger said. “And in return, you keep the place up and go quietly when Rob asks you to, whenever that may be.”

“What's in it for him?”

“I get a caretaker I can rely on. Dodger vouches for you. And who knows, when the time comes, there might be some other empty property I need someone for I can move you to. No promises, but there's plenty of empty buildings these days in London, in case you haven't noticed.”

“Yeah,” Dodger said. “And you keep it up -- we keep it up, since I'll go over everything with you and make sure the wiring isn't going to burn the place down. And in return, you don't grass him out to the council for substandard living conditions and whatnot. It's a fair trade -- you won't find a fairer one, right? Best of all, you get legit, which means you don't have to worry about getting tossed out on a moment's notice. Rob here will give you at least a month to get your stuff together, probably more. Honestly mate, this is it, the squatter's holy grail.”

Jem nodded slowly. “It certainly sounds like it. You always hear about landlords who work out that the best thing for everyone is to let you stay until it's time to go. But I'd figured they were an urban legend -- like the kindly copper or the hooker with a heart of gold.”

“Just call me a living legend,” Rob said. He seemed supremely cool and unruffled by all this. I guess if I had loads of money and proper villains like Dodger for mates, I'd be super-cool, too.

I was starting to get my head around what this all meant. “We've missed your cooking 'round here, Dodger -- you staying for lunch?” I thought it'd be good to get us all think- ing about the fact that we were all mates, that Dodger was one of the original Jammie Dodgers.

He grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Rob, you want a feed?” Rob looked a little uncomfortable for the first time; my guess was he was a little squeamish about the idea of eating garbage, but to his credit, he rallied.

“Sure,” he said, and just like that, the tension was broken. Dog and Chester -- who, I think, had always felt a little like Johnnie-come-latelies and thus not entitled to speak up on matters of household management -- visibly thawed, and Dodger produced a baggy of his insane weed, and someone had papers, and the afternoon got very warm and friendly. Dodger scoured our freezer for gourmet tidbits, and ended up doing marrow bones, cod cheeks, grilled eels, and heaps of veg and beans, all arranged so artfully on the plate you hardly wanted to eat it.

Dog hardly wanted to eat it anyway, having no taste for organ meats and that delicacies, but we made such a great show of smacking our lips and groaning in ecstasy that he stopped trying to hide his marrow bone under his lentils and instead dug out the rich, oily brown stuff from within and piled some on the little triangle of brown toast -- day old bread from the deep-freeze -- with butter and tentatively tasted it. Thereafter, he became some sort of mythic, organ-devouring beast, who scarfed it all up and asked for seconds and then thirds, and there was white wine, and then Jem did coffee things, and Rob told hilarious dirty jokes, and the afternoon raced past and before we knew it, it was evening and our tummies strained at our waistbands.

By the time we pushed back from the table, we were all fast friends. Rob's bottomless supply of dirty jokes, Dodger's cooking, and Jem's coffee-making-fu had bonded us as effectively as a two-part epoxy.

“You're the guy from the Pirate Cinema, yeah?” Rob said. I felt myself blush. Just how many people saw the cover of Time Out and The Guardian, anyway? A lot, it seemed.

“We all did it,” I said. “I just did the talking at the beginning.”

Chester blew a raspberry. “Cecil there's the genius auteur around here. The rest of us are dogsbodies and hacks.”

“I was gutted that I'd missed it,” Rob said, grinning. “I had so many mates that went along, but I thought it all sounded too dodgy, going off to the sewer and that. Figured that it would be some wanky art-student film and I'd be stuck in the shit-pit with it. Downloaded it, though, afterward. Good stuff! Really -- brilliant!”

I blushed harder.

“You shoulda been there,” Chester said. “It was a hundred times better with the whole crowd and all.”

“Well,” Rob said. “You'll have to let me know the next time you do one.”

Jem got a sneaky look. “You wouldn't happen to have any derelict buildings lying about that you wouldn't mind seeing used as a theater now and again, would you, Rob?”

I opened my mouth to tick Jem off -- Rob was already giving us a free spot to live, what more did we want? -- but before I could, Rob got a faraway look in his eye. “Gosh,” he said. “Now that you mention it, I rather suspect I do.”

Dodger let out an evil chuckle. “You've got a devious mind, Jem-o,” he said.

“He does, doesn't he?” Rob said. “I can see I'm going to have to watch out for you, young master. But you know, I've always fancied being a patron of the arts. This sounds like it'd be miles better than getting your name on a sign in a dusty wing of a museum.”

“Plus you wouldn't believe the girls that turn up at this sort of thing,” Dodger said, though as far as I knew, he'd never been to a Confusing Peach night, but he spoke with the utter confidence of a lifelong bullshit artist. And anyway, Rob was old twenty-five or thirty, and most of the people at a Confusing Peach party were my age. Whatever -- if he could get off with some lady, who was I to look askance?

26 rang me from work; she'd been pulling the late shift at the anarchist bookstore more and more, as she tried to juggle all the crazy film stuff, her schoolwork, and, erm, me.

“Why don't you come pick me up?” she said. “Annika's around and she's really interested in Sewer Cinema.” My fame had no bounds, it seemed.

“I'll come straight over,” I said. Any residual intoxication from the wine and the weed had been burned away by Jem's coffee, which had the ability to cook away booze remnants like a flamethrower crisping a butterfly.

I went to my room to dress and dumped out the bag of Bradford clothes I'd taken home from my room. I contemplated it, lying limp on my bed, and realized that before I came to London, I'd dressed like a total burk. Honestly -- shiny wind-cheaters with the names of sports teams? I didn't even like sport! T-shirts with rude slogans? Transparent kicks with fat electroluminescent laces that strobed like the most pathetic disco ever? Seriously -- how had my family allowed me to leave the house looking like such a, a... hick? Like someone who dressed himself by studying the Primark adverts on the bus-stations? Well, at least the underpants and socks were salvageable, just.

So I put on my Bradford underwear and slipped on a pair of oversize green trousers, cut with that funny mid-leg wibble that made it look a little like you were wearing knee-pads; a pair of cut-down black wellies trimmed to sneaker-height; a crew-neck sweater embroidered with nylon fishing-line hung with mismatched buttons and a huge, waxed-cotton coat that started out as a surplus butcher's smock, carefully waterproofed by rubbing it over and over again with soft wax. I looked at myself in the dirty mirror beside Jem's mural in the corridor and grinned: I looked like a proper Londoner now. No one in Bradford dressed like this.

The bookshop was just shutting when I got there. 26 was selling a hippie-looking old dude a thick book on African history. He chewed a lock of his hair while she rang it up, then paid her in pound coins that he carefully doled out of his pocket, counting them aloud. He was about par for the course at the bookshop -- all the customers were a bit odd. That was okay: I'd decided I'd rather be where the odd people were. They had more fun.

Annika was checking the stock and dusting shelves and doing all the other closing-down things that 26 usually did at the end of the night. As soon as the hippie guy was gone, she helped 26 count out the till while I made tea and scrounged some organic multi-grain agave-sweetened vegan biccies that tasted only about half as horrible as they sounded. Annika put the cash-box away in its hiding place -- a nook in a shadow under the stairs to the cellar, a box that had once held the gas-meter for the shop when it had been a flat. They deposited the previous day's cash every day at lunch-time, because no one wanted to carry around a couple hundred quid in late-night east London.

Then we all sat down and Annika sipped her tea and dipped her biccie and I watched the elaborate, tentacled tattoo writhe around her skinny throat and down her skinny arms. “Cecil,” she said, “I'm really glad you came down tonight. You see, I've heard about the Sewer Cinema you and 26 and your friends put on, the films you showed, the things you said. I wanted to tell you what an absolutely wonderful job you did. I don't know what you could have done to make it any better, honestly -- it's got everyone talking about the right thing.”

26 kissed me below the ear and squeezed my shoulders and I felt my ears turning red. I could see why 26 liked Annika so much; she was so calm, so assured, and she was very beautiful (though not as beautiful as 26, I hastily told myself). “Thank you,” I said. “It wasn't just me, you know.”

“Oh, I know. It's never just one person. But you're the one who's got his face in the papers and on the news. Which means that you're the one they'll be looking for when the time comes.”

I gulped. “When the time comes?”

She shook her head. “You know what I mean. We're kicking the hornets' nest. That's good. I'm all for kicking hornets' nests! But when you do that, the hornets come out and swarm. I think it's a good bet that the coppers'll be looking for you before long.”

I sighed. “Of course,” I said. This had been in the back of my mind all along, ever since I'd seen the papers. “Do you think they'll try to put me in jail?”

She shrugged. “Depends on how chummy the coppers and the entertainment types are that day. They might charge you with criminal trespass on the sewer, or they might charge you with criminal copyright infringement. Or both. Impossible to say.”

I nodded. “Yeah. But they tried to shut down Confusing Peach and they failed. We took the private Pirate Cinema and opened them to the public. So we lost the TIP vote -- maybe that means we'll just have to beat them outside of Parliament.”

She smiled broadly and radiated approval. I basked in it. “That's the stuff,” she said. “Why not -- we could get hit by a bus tomorrow, after all. But there's no sense in you going to jail if you don't have to, yeah? So here's what I was thinking: there's a lot of us around here who've been at this for a long time. Why don't you teach us how you do your cinema nights, and we'll help with the work. You can show up in disguise -- some of us are good at that -- and watch the proceedings, but we'll have it all done by people in masks and so on. No more faces. 26 told me you had some more locations you were scouting --”

I nodded, and told them about Rob, and his offer of more places to throw events.

Annika nodded sagely. “I've heard about this bloke -- he bought up a squat in Brixton where some friends of mine were living. They got to stay on for six months, then he moved them to another place in Streatham. Good for his word, I think. A rare bird, this: a landlord with a good heart. Most of them would rather see their places sitting empty than occupied by dirty squatters who don't pay for their lodgings.”

I nodded enthusiastically. “He really seemed nice. And between his other empty buildings and the underground sites that we found in that book --”

She nodded back. “We could throw a new cinema every week. Do you think you could make enough films for that, though?”

26 set down her tea-cup. “Oh, there's plenty of people out there making films. I don't think we need to worry on that score. I'd be more worried about getting raided or whatnot.”

Annika chuckled. “Oh, we've been through this before; I used to put on raves, back when I was just a little girl. It's an art and a science, a balance between technology and staying below the threshold for too much scrutiny. You'll learn it quick, you two. You're dead clever, aren't you?”

I couldn't argue with that. We clinked tea-cups.

Son of commercial interlude

I spend about four months a year on the road, all over the world, touring with my books (they're published in a lot of countries). Everywhere I go, I'm hosted by booksellers, whose customers fill their stores and then come up after the reading and Q&A for a signature and a chat. I'm always reminded of just how much I love bookstores. I'm a recovering bookseller, having worked at Bakka Books, Toronto's magnificent sf/f bookstore, as well as the late, lamented College Books. In honor of those stores, I've omitted the usual list of online booksellers in favor of a single link:

Booksense (will locate a store near you!)

That's the Indiebound/Booksense directory of independent bookstores across America. Punch in your ZIP code, they'll find you a store in the neighborhood with my book on the shelf.

Tell them I sent you, OK?