Oobla-di, Ooobla-dah, life goes on

Naturally, I'd love to keep the previous post alive forever, frozen in a perfect moment of time, Ray Bradbury style. But life moves on, and people have shorter and shorter attention spans these days. Everyone applauds for a few moments, but then they always say, "What's next?"

There's just no pleasing you people, is there?

So I must bid last weekend adieu and prepare for this Saturday, where I will have a booth at the Placentia Heritage Festival. This is the 45th year of the festival, which celebrates all things Placentia. It begins with a pancake breakfast, followed by a parade that segues into a day of merriment in Tri-City Park. There will be food, games, a car show, and… me!

The price for reserving a booth was reasonable, and I have my own table and canopy, so I figured why not? Freezer Burn is set in Placentia. There are a lot of Placentia landmarks in it. The neighbors who've read it love seeing their local streets and stores in print. It'd be a crime not to have a presence at the festival.

Besides, Karen (my publisher) would kill me if I missed this opportunity.

I'm sorry to say, I don't think my full-sized Dean Martin will be attending. I discovered at the library event, that he doesn't tolerate wind well, or perhaps he secretly wants to parasail. In addition, I'm pretty certain that my booth will be on the grass, which will not be good on his toes. But I'll bring a picture.

If you're in the north Orange County area this Saturday, between 10 a.m. and 3:30 p.m, please stop by and say hello.

In other news, I finally got my book into the Barnes & Noble, AND the Borders ordering system. It was a little difficult until I figured out what to do. I went to the Borders in Brea first, then the Barnes & Noble in Fullerton, and they couldn't have been nicer. I scheduled a signing in both stores for early November (1st and 6th, respectively).

One interesting thing - neither of the stores have CRMs anymore. A CRM is a Community Relations Manager, and at least used to be the person you scheduled your signings through. Apparently, they also scheduled appearances by characters, like Clifford or Winnie the Pooh. I found this out when John, the B&N manager, was trying to schedule me while he spoke on the phone with a woman who (I think) wanted to schedule her fuzzy-suited character in the store. I meant to ask if the whole CRM position was fading away, but we both got distracted looking over the schedule.

But before I hit the hometown bookstores, I'm traveling to the Midwest next week. I'll start at Bouchercon in Indianapolis, then cruise over to my birthplace, Decatur, Illinois. It's only about three hours from Indy. I'm scheduled for one library event in neighboring Mt. Zion on Monday (10/19), and a second library event in Decatur on Tuesday (10/20). My topics are completely different, so people can visit me twice and not hear the same thing.

This means I better go work on the outline of each talk, if I want to avoid any tangential rambling.

Oh, and before I forget - I will be having some guests come and post for the next month or so. I don't have a set schedule yet, except to say that Wendy Ely will be joining me next Wednesday to discuss how she stubbornly avoided writing what she knew, in order to write what she wanted to know.

Stay tuned!