Very little that I’ve done puts me over the moon (beside my family). I mean, I live and work in a small Orange County suburb. I drive a soccer/jazz choir/orchestra mother-of-four car. I wear stretchy active wear pants. I know you didn’t really want to know all that, but it sets up how perfectly amazing this thing, this impossible thing that happened this morning makes me feel.
Remember when I found out from a librarian at that they have St. Nacho’s in some branch of the Chicago Public Library? ZOMG, that was a great feeling. Libraries are sacred!
Well, I discovered this, this morning:
I know it doesn’t look like much, but this is A Different Light Bookstore’s current homepage, and it has me in the form of Crossing Borders snuggled right up there next to Armistead Maupin. SQUEE!
I dunno. Stuff like that just KNOCKS my socks off. First of all, A Different Light Bookstore! That’s a fabulous bookstore. I couldn’t get arrested in there when I went to San Francisco to check it out the first time. They wouldn’t even order a book for me, going so far as to tell me that it was out of print. Which it wasn’t. I went back to the hotel room and bought it online at Amazon that afternoon.
ADL employees weren’t known, like Cecily from The Importance Of Being Ernest, for the sweetness of their disposition. Or maybe they just didn’t want to deal with women? The clerk was distinctly chilly to me, maybe because I had my adolescent son in tow. I was in San Francisco that time to Chaperone my kid’s GATE field trip. We stayed the weekend and decided to brave Castro because I’d read the ADL ad and wanted a copy of this book:
This is an awesome read, by the way.
At any rate, I came home to find it waiting on my doorstep, quickly fulfilled by the Amazon Wonder Elves. I fight the entity that is Amazon, (I picture I’m like one of those Apes at the beginning of 2001 and it’s the monolith) but I can say that when I went to ADL, a brick-and -morter bookstore because they purported to carry this item on their shelves, they sent me away empty handed and feeling like I ought to stick to sunning myself under the blue flashing light at K-mart. I also came home feeling that as a woman and a barely published author I didn’t have the right to walk into that store, and that I had probably never try to go back, even though at the time their best selling book was J.L. Langley’s The Tin Star.
This isn’t sour grapes by the way, because as proprietors of their store, they have a right to maintain any attitude they want. There are plenty of exclusive hair salons, for example, or clothing stores that would exclude me as a customer, (Pretty Woman, anyone?) because their cachet depends on keeping people like me out. That’s sad, but it’s true. It’s also entirely possible I caught the sales clerk on the day his dog threw up on his master’s thesis, his grandmother had a car accident, someone stole his motorcycle, or he was nursing a broken heart and his young lover’s disapproving mother looked JUST LIKE ME. Seriously. Who knows why things happen?
I never imagined I’d sell there, although I know they now carry my books in print at the store as well, or at least someone I know bought ePistols At Dawn there. And I never imagined I’d see myself all curled up with a brilliant author like Armistead Maupin, who I’m sure woke up this morning to the same ad and said, What the F*&K? I’m next to some soccer mom with a word processor and nothing better to do than write romance novels??? It’s all good, folks. Just a delight for me, as a writer, to see my work in that context.
And when you add to that the fact that my kid’s a cappella jazz choir sang the National Anthem for the Chivas v. Galaxy Soccer match last night (Galaxy #23 is hella hot, by the way.)
It’s a glorious day to be me!
You can check out the books at ADL, HERE
