The next big thing.

I met the author Susanna Clarke tonight, and she was really, really genuine and sweet. Her signing at the Margaret Mitchell House was the first stop on her press tour of the U.S. to support her first novel, "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," a fantasy book about two magicians that I've been chatting up - without having actually read it - to friends and customers for weeks.



Speaking before a group of about 50 people, Clarke was engaging, occasionally funny and told an interesting group of stories revealing how the book came about. But what I think I admired the most about her was that she was reading from notecards and clearly quite nervous about the whole speaking-in-public thing, which made her sort of darling.

I mean, sometime earlier this year, she gets paid a reportedly huge advance from Bloomsbury, a publisher, for the book it took her 10 years to properly research and finish. The marketing campaign behind it is massive, and reviews in the New York Times start calling it "the adult HARRY POTTER." It's put on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize. In its first week of publication, it's currently in the top 10 of Amazon's bestsellers.

This was her first stop, and this was the first time she'd been in a town to promote the book AFTER it was available in stores.

Clarke said, at the beginning of her speech, that she'd already found the first JONATHAN STRANGE-related fan fiction published on the Internet.

"Someone tied in my story with PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN," she said, letting the audience laugh. "And I read it, and the story was actually pretty good."

In six months, as the sales continue and the buzz grows, she'll have a completely different take on the whole thing, so it was a really great privilege to see her before it all sunk in.

During the Q&A for the book, I asked her a very general and open question just because I was curious if she'd give a stock answer.

"I don't mean to ask something so broad," I started. "But how does all this FEEL? The advance praise, the sales, the reviews and being in front of people here."

"How does all this feel?" Clarke repeated for the crowd. "It feels really great. I mean, to look at all the sales and such and the reviews, to take it all in, that starts to overwhelm me. But here, concentrating on this moment in front of all of you, that I can focus on, and this feels really great."

Clarke told us about the books she'd tried to write before finishing this one, saying that she'd attempted a detective story only to find that it didn't really have a plot, "which is kind of important in a detective story."

With "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," she found that the title characters, who in the book both exhibit attention-grabbing egos despite different personalities, wouldn't escape her head when she would try to take a break from the book.

"I could never stop writing it for longer than a day," she said, saying the characters, in their way, insisted that she finish the story.

She mentioned books that influenced her, saying that she reread "The Lord of the Rings" twice while recovering from an illness during the 1990s. (My friend Mike, sitting next to me at the reading, giggled at this. He rereads that book once a year.)

She said she fell in love with the language of the books, the creation of that world. She said rereading Tolkien reminded her that the books she had fallen in love with as a child were books of magic - particularly C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia," so she decided to tackle that as a subject.

Stylistically, she used Jane Austen as a model.

To get the setting of England during the Napoleonic wars right, Clarke researched history extensively, finding that first-person battlefield accounts contained a useful level of detail that she borrowed from in creating her book.

Quirky characters from Normandy and random details about the life of Byron, for instance, factor into "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell." She also factored in her views on the cultural differences between the peoples of Northern and Southern England.

From what I've read of the very detailed, amusing, 800-plus-page novel, Clarke's effort is a success.

She said, though, that she felt she'd done right as an author when she received fan mail from someone, saying her book had kept them up at night.

"Authors are a mean lot," she said. "When he told me he'd lost sleep because of my book, I'd felt I'd done what I set out to do."

After the program, I stood in line to get two copies of the book signed, one for me and another for a friend.

When I got to really talk to Clarke, I didn't know exactly what to say, and I didn't want to sound hokey. (I thought my Q&A question could've been better, for, naturally, the reply was going to be "really good and kinda overwhelming," which is what her reply sorta was.)

I thought about her notecards. So I said what I would've said to someone in my college debate society after they gave their first speech.

"You did well up there," I said, looking into her eyes. "You should be really proud of yourself."

She really should be.

She smiled at me and started to thank me.

"Sorry," I apologized immediately, "that probably came out silly. I didn't know the best way to say it."

"Actually, that was a great way to put it," Clarke said to me, again genuine. "Thank you."

I looked over at her publicist, who was also smiling at me for saying something reassuring to a first-time author.

Clarke took a piece of scrap paper out and printed the spelling of my name to see that she got it right.

I told her I'd been to London for the first time in April and loved it. I told her a friend of mine edited the letters page at The Guardian, and she said that her partner, a man named Colin Greenland traveling with her, did reviews for them on occasion.

So I told her that the highlight of my writing career was a column on the Guardian website, my sole claim to fame.

And Clarke looked at me and said, "Really?"

And I felt cool.

So I told her that it'd been a real treat meeting her and that I wished her much luck with the book.

Then I went over to her partner and said hello, saying that he must be proud of her.

"She's been great," Greenland said. "I could've never done it, sold a book. I'm just a journalist."

It was funny. They were really cool people.

And now I'm dying to read her book.