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Having taken part in SA4QE since it first started, and used a great number of quotes from Russell Hoban's books, this year I thought I'd share a passage from an interview that Russ gave in 1995 and which has only recently come to light. James Carter interviewed Hoban for his masters dissertation on The Mouse and His Child, and it lay dormant until it was submitted to russellhoban.org last November. It's one of the best Hoban interviews I've read.

I printed a dozen copies, leaving one on the southbound tube train that took me to Clapham Common, another on a park bench, and a couple more at a bus stop I walked past. A couple more I tucked into newspapers at cafes near my place of work, and another in a phone box - not that anyone much uses these nowadays, except for non-telephonic purposes. After work I left another on the train that took me back to Elephant and Castle - noting en route that the park bench copy was still there, although thumbed; left in situ I hope in a spirit of generosity rather than indifference.

For the last few years I have put up quotes in my village for sa4qe on my own, so it was lovely to be able to do it this year with my boyfriend, Rik, whom I met through a conversation on Twitter about Hoban. We bonded through our mutual love of The Medusa Frequency in particular. I live next to a river and wanted my first quote - sellotaped to the local lifebuoy - to be one of Hoban's lyrical evocations of the natural world; this mix of lyricism and natural elements feels romantic too.

I've been taking part in this curious and lovely annual celebration since it started in 2002, and today was the first time I celebrated in tandem. I met my girlfriend Katy on Twitter after we got into a conversation about Russell Hoban, specifically The Medusa Frequency. Two years later we're still crazy about each other, in the full Hobanic sense of the word, although for logistical reasons we're not always able to be in the same city at the same time.

This year I thought, 'Short excerpt, bigger type', and fixed my offerings in otherwise desolate or dispiriting purlieux.

Happy Russmas, one and all.

This year I left my quotations around Watford. The first in Watford library, in the reading section, hopefully to an interested audience. The second at Cha Cha Cha cafe in Cassiobury Park, Watford. It's a cold day for anybody to be in the park but the cafe is popular with people who have time to spare. I left it on a windowsill along with various leaflets left by other people and organisations. The cake at Cha Cha Cha is great, by the way!

I first became aware of the SA4QE in about 2005 from an article in The Guardian. At that time I was mainly housebound with chronic illness, and knew no one else who participated, so I did the event solitarily for several years, leaving sheets of (I have to admit non-yellow) paper around the local village green next to the river. Leaving Hoban’s quotes here felt playful and subversive, a fitting tribute to a quixotic writer.

I've contributed to SA4QE over the last few years, but usually by the skin of my teeth, for various reasons. This year an archetypal 'bad day at work' left me in no frame of mind to consider choosing quotes or find inventive places to distribute them. As a result, my yellow paper quotes went out into the world the day after Russ' birthday, in the morning on my way to my necessary, but hated job. The quotations themselves were chosen not as firm favourites, but by a quite random method.

I really wanted to do SA4QE properly this year. I've read about others doing it for years, and the best I managed was normally a bit of loose-leaf paper in Borders (that shows you how long ago that was) or a post on Facebook (pitiful). This year I was planning on dropping a couple of words (which sounds pleasingly like a metaphor for taking mind-altering drugs), but I had the idea of making bookmarks. I liked the thought that they were less likely to be thrown away, more likely to hang about. I like bookmarks.