The Throne of Kipling

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Okay, I exaggerated when I said that I sat and wrote at Kipling's desk.  It was a desk in Kipling's study, the room where he did indeed write Captains Courageous and both volumes of The Jungle Book.  But the Lanndmark Trust is in the business of saving endangered buildings and by the time they got hold of Naulakha, most of the furniture was long gone.  

However, one sacred relic remains which has known the flesh of the Great Man . . .  I refer of course to Kipling's crapper.

That's it, in the photo above.  It comes complete with instructions on how to treat it with the utmost care an antiquity of its significance deserves.


And this will be short because . . .

I leave on Thursday for Conquest in Kansas City and I have preparations to make, bags to pack, a speech to put together, and (if I can) the panel topics to think about.  Luckily, they got the program to me on Friday.  Last year, when I complained to the programming person of a convention whose name conveniently escapes my memory that I couldn't do any serious prep on day's notice, he opined that "It would have been nice to be able to give you a week's notice . . . but that's just not the way things are in the real world."

Also, I've got some ideas for my Dala horse story, and my alien worm autopsy story and . . .  Well, we'll see how much I can manage to do.

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