The Mighty Jasper Fforde

That's what the poster said, anyway! I didn't know until last night that Jasper Fforde was a local author. He writes the Thursday Next and Nursery Crimes series, and he gave a talk in the library last night.
He was a little bit late, and while the audience settled down, Jane the librarian announced: "He's not coming - hands up anyone who's written a book - you'll have to take over!" There were actually two published authors there - Val Tyler was sitting on the table at the back with her husband. "We're in the dress circle," she said ("breaking all sorts of Health and Safety rules - you'll have to sign a disclaimer," said Jane) and Celia Boyd was in the back row.
He was a very entertaining speaker, and gave some very good advice about the publishing business, and how it works. It took him ten years to get an agent interested in The Eyre Affair, and it was his sixth novel, I think he said. He said publishers like it if you mention you've written four or five unpublished novels (and probably unpublishable novels) because it shows stickability, and he said that he had improved enormously from his first novel to the one that got published.
He talked about copyright, too - and how he was advised that he couldn't use Eeyore, because Disney owns the rights.
And he talked about how his plots come to him. He's not one of those authors who outlines carefully and then follows the outline - he has ideas as he's writing that lead him off on strange tangents. Like the Welsh Socialist Republic. He wanted his villain to live in an airship originally, but his editor didn't like the idea very much, so he invented the Welsh Socialist Republic out of thin air, sort of like Poland in the 1970s with choirs and rugby, with the capital at Merthyr Tydfil. Then he dug around a bit in Welsh history and found that it had almost happened in real life!
At the end, there were flapjacks - very tasty ones, too, and Jasper signed a few books and stayed to chat.
He has a website full of interesting and odd things - like Spot the Hamlet, and the Seven Wonders of Swindon, and he's writing his next book at the moment.