favorite author rick roll thing reminder.
OH YES, THANK YOU ANON
Okay so, now that it isn’t 4am, lemme tell you about the first time I ever got to meet an author I admire.
I have been a fan of Jasper Fforde since I was about 13 years old and friendly enough with the school librarians for them to let me into the senior fiction section. I picked up ‘Lost in a Good Book’, got confused about the plot, realised it was a sequel, went back and read ’The Eyre Affair’, and have been in love with Fforde’s weird and wonderful worldbuilding and extremely odd references ever since.
Fast forward a decade and I’ve build up a picture of Fforde in my head based on his style of writing, and I tend to think of him as austere, quiet, sharply witty, and perhaps a little full of himself.
AND THEN NO
I finally got the chance to meet him in person when he was doing a tour for his latest book ‘Early Riser’, and he turned out to be one of the most adorable people I have ever met, stumbling over his words and cracking terrible jokes and listing off a bunch of words he reckons belong in the english dictionary, so he’d be very grateful if us readers would use them and make them more popular, because the only way he reckons he’ll achieve immortality is either through inventing a word, or by getting to be a guest on BBC4′s Desert Island Discs.
(the one word/phrase I will definitely be using is ‘strop goblin’, because I have never heard a better description of a contrary child in my life)
And then he started talking about old things he wishes he could bring back, because they’ve just fallen out of the social consciousness for the most part.
And then he started talking about how he tried to put Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up in his book, because he felt people were starting to forget how big a thing it used to be.
This critically acclaimed and internationally renowned author whose works are prized for their intellectual merit, and for which there are literal competitions over who can work our all the obscure references in his books…
….tried to Rickroll his readers.
Sadly he had to take it out of the final printed draft due to copyright purposes, but that didn’t stop me from laughing so hard that I almost fell out of the chair and Jasper actually stopped talking to ask if I was okay.
