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Piece of Cake

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My first book signing was Saturday. I went to Union Avenue Books, owned by Flossie and her daughter Bunny. (Feel free to try, but they’ve heard all the name jokes already.)

The unflappable Flossie, wearing a pretty orange scarf about a foot longer than she is, introduced me to 25 or so people standing around, waiting for something to happen. Turns out they were waiting for me. Well, that was nice of them!

I wanted my first signing to  be in Knoxville, the closest thing I have to a hometown. I went to university there, and my parents still live in the area. In fact, they showed up at the signing with a cake decorated to look like my book’s jacket–and a good story about how Mom got it.

The people at the cake decorating place said they couldn’t do the cover design, because it was copyrighted. My mother pointed out that it was my house on the cover, and my book it was covering, but this cut no cake–er, mustard–with the Food City team. She then suggested that all the evidence would be eaten before the copyright police could be called, it being a Saturday and them not working weekends and all. The cake decorators thought this over, then agreed they could reproduce the design IF my name was in a different color than on the book.

Whew. Glad Mom dodged jail time on that one.

So with cake, Flossie guiding the proceedings, Jack reading the “lost Chunky” story from the book, and me telling in my own words the “lonely cop prologue” story, a little Q&A and a whole lot of laughs, my first book signing went down a treat. Piece of cake, really.

Among the attendees were five ex-pat Big Stone Gappers, who’d read about the signing in the (very nice) articles that ran in the Daily Times and the Knoxville News Sentinel. We held “is it still there” conversations before the event started. Also attending was my honors program adviser from the nearby university, Dr. Wheeler. (I apologized to him for letting down the scholarship program that had given me a free four-year ride, by becoming a writer and academic. I know Dr. W had better hopes for his proteges.)

And it was lovely to have three friends show up: Carolyn, Ginger, and Maria, with friends of theirs towed in their wake.  They, along with the very pleasant strangers and Gap-ois, made a well-rounded audience who asked great questions and took care of the copyrighted cake quite nicely.

So it is now safe to say that my first book signing was a piece of cake.

The Bookshelf Con

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(Jack and Wendy have headed off to the first book-signing today, leaving Andrew Whalen, shopsitter, extraordinaire in charge. Here’s Andrew’s guest blog for this weekend.)

I have a big secret:

I’m keeping a little list on the side, like a mob bookie running numbers outside of The Family. The list contains books I’ve found on the shelves here at Tales of the Lonesome Pine, and desire… AND I WILL HAVE THEM.

I wrote earlier about the perils of alphabetizing, and I’ve continued to  tackle a shelf a day. It makes me look dutiful and pragmatic. Section by section I can be sure that the shop is in an order I can navigate. It even helps me get to know the stock more, so I can help customers.

WINK.

THE-STING-NOSE-RUB.

You see, I was actually running a long con. Alphabetizing is just the excuse for eye-balling books that I super want to filch. Books that I want to transform from books into possessions.

The thing is, I could probably just hide them. But that would be unsportsmanlike. And the classic gentleman con-man values honor above all else. He also dresses really dapper. Still working on that one. Okay, no I’m not, that’s a lie… or a CON. So I’ve left them in place, visible and perfectly alphabetized. It is up to the whims of the bookstore to determine whether they get sold or not.

At first I figured that my tastes ran weird enough that I was safe. I would not hoard gold, like a dragon, but leave it out for all to see, and still I would win the day and walk away with my reward. But then, justhours after placing one of my beloveds, in comes a customer. He pulled MY book off the shelf. If he had seen me stroking the cover and purring, “YES MY SWEET YES YOU WILL BE MINE,” less than an hour earlier, well, he may have been too grossed out to touch it. But no, he flopped it onto the table and handed over his filthy lucre. “Going to use this for toilet paper… for my incontinent iguana,” he said, in my mind, where I imagined him being an awful person.

So the game’s afoot. The books are out on the shelves. I’m not going to tell you what any of them are, but there are several in the Sci-Fi section, one in General Fiction, and one in History. OR THIS IS A DOUBLE BLUFF.

And now, with this blog post, I’m definitely spilling the beans. The jig is up. Unless this blog post is all part of my elaborate ruse…

THE-STING-NOSE-RUB… AGAIN.