No sales. (Not even a check in the POB from those who had promised one.)
I did have a visitor to my table pick up a “Schiz.” She had dyed black hair – maybe not her own (or maybe I’ve been watching too much “Shtisel”) – and had fled where she had been sitting because another woman had been “staring daggers” at her. She was impressed I had a cover quote from R. Crumb, but mainly, she said, she had been interested in my attire (khaki sport jacket over black sweat shirt, jeans, and cowboy hat). “Very GQ,” she said.
For the record, I did not feel sexually harassed.
In other news…
The meeting with the Russian publisher (See previous Adventure) is set. (Expect “glacial” progress, Mary cautions.) And Adele and I have been invited to pitch IWKYA to the Oakland Mended Hearts chapter to which I belong at its monthly meeting which I have never attended.
And despite three people thinking our launch party had already occurred and one thinking it is to be at a place it isn’t (seemingly representative problems with members of our core demographic) and other invitees already committed to Baja and Yosemite and one fellow who doesn’t like books about illness-and-recovery (“Would you prefer I didn’t recover?” I said. “Wait for the sequel.”), we expect to crack the 50-person barrier. (May have to order more cheese dip and Ritz Crackers.) One fellow is inviting his entire book group.
Finally, one of my biggest kicks from writing comes when when something I’ve written long ago clicks with someone in the here-and-now. This just happened with a piece I wrote over a decade ago about the comic book artist Alex Toth. An artist/critic whose work and writing I admire tells me he will be teaching this piece in his course at SVA. I see two angles. Toth was a magnificent artist – and a miserable human being. And his magnificent artistry was put in service of stories that were anything but. My money is on the second.