Sauce. Genocide. Sedatives.

I'm waiting for a connection in JFK airport at the beginning of a book-signing tour, eating egg foo yung from an outlet named Wok & Roll. 'You want sauce?' the Chinese bloke asks me. 'What flavour have you got?' I ask. He looks at me for a minute. 'Green,' he says.

I had to fill in an arrival form on the plane. One of the questions asked me if I was entering the US to engage in criminal or immoral activities. I wonder if anyone's ever answered yes to that one. Another enquired if I'm guilty of genocide. Yep, I eradicated an entire race only last week. They were laughing at me, and I just lost it. Can I still come in?

I was flown over already in April for a pre-pub tour, before the book was released. Being new to the writing game I was naturally expecting to tour for a bit, and then go to the pub. I'm from Dublin, and that's how we'd do it there. It turned out that pre-pub was short for pre-publication, and the tour consisted of having dinner with a number of extremely friendly booksellers in various choice restaurants. This is not a hard job, I thought to myself, and I was right.

The booksellers fell chiefly into two categories; young earnest girls who read around eighty childrens' books a week, foregoing sleep and who knows what else in the pursuit of Total Catalogue Penetration, and pleasant elderly ladies who know a great deal about everything, especially seafood. Men are thin on the ground in the world of childrens' publishing, but not altogether absent. They're usually in partnership with their wives, for extra protection.

This time around I'll be 'appearing' at a number of schools and bookshops around the country, talking to kids and signing a lot of books. Back in the days when it was necessary to sign a hundred travellers' cheques before setting off on holiday I used to find that my signature fell apart about halfway through the batch. If you find a 'signed' copy of my book (it's called The Palace of Laughter) with a sort of spastic pen line dribbling off the title page, it might still be genuine. It's probably from the end of a session. This might make it a little too easy for forgers, especially if they're drunk or under the influence of sedatives, which would probably be the case if they decided my signature was worth forging in the first place. Maybe I should get a stamp made up.