It's Saturday August 13, the skies are grey and louring, and I'm sitting in a yurt in Charlotte Square Gardens wearing a vest, a t-shirt, a jumper, and two pairs of socks. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: the Edinburgh international book festival has begun!
It's the Guardian's first year sponsoring the festival, so all is new and thrilling for us - and, perhaps, for you too. Over the next two weeks (the EIBF runs until August 28th, making it the world's biggest books festival) we'll be keeping everyone who can't make it there this year up to speed with what's going on. What we're going to try to do with our coverage is step out of the way as much as possible, and just give you the sense of what it's like to be here; to that end, we'll have daily video interviews with festival authors (as well as longer films once a week; the first, a tour of Edinburgh with Alexander McCall Smith, will be up on Monday), twice-weekly editions of the books podcast on Mondays and Fridays, and live chats with festival authors from Jasper Fforde to Maggie O'Farrell.
We'll also live-tweet the most promising-looking events, keep you updated with festival news, post author photo galleries to give you a flavour of the festivities and blog about any interesting subjects that are thrown up. Those of you who tweet can follow all our festival coverage on the #edbookfest hashtag. And for festival-goers, or wannabe goers, our erstwhile Edinburgh beatblogger Michael MacLeod will post daily blogs letting you know which events still have tickets available, to facilitate last-minute snaffling.
I'm off now to my first festival event - Richard T Kelly and Kevin MacNeil discussing 21st century gothic - and will report back in a bit. If there's anything we're not doing that you think we ought to be - shout. Otherwise, sit back, enjoy, and think of us as we shiver.
