Brooklyn Book Festival

October 7, 2014

When people live in New Jersey, the borough of Brooklyn is viewed with much anxiety and excitement, because it’s relatively unexplored by we Jerseyans. Myths and legends abound, but there’s is precious little actual information. We hear tales of men with outrageous facial hair and people amassing small fortunes via Air BnB, but when you go there it’s pretty much just like every other urban area. When I was given the opportunity to spend an hour signing We Are Not Good People at the Mystery Writers of America‘s table at the Brooklyn Book Festival recently, I agreed because so far wishing very hard hasn’t resulted in anyone paying attention to my book, and because I am always looking for ways to defy the various restraining orders that bookstores have on me.

It was a sultry day. So sultry I almost swooned several times, and had to be resuscitated by my friends Ken West and Sean Ferrell, who showed up demanding I pay them monies I owed them, then stuck around on orders from The Duchess, who feared I would slip away without supervision to the nearest bar.

Ken offers me a quarter for my book while Sean laughs uproariously, delighted at my humiliation.

I was sharing the table for an hour with author Tracey Landau, who employed the shocking strategy of actually talking to people and engaging them in an attempt to sell books. I chose the traditional method of acting like talking to people would be a social faux pas, and instead practiced looking aloof. Somehow, traffic was slow at our table. Eventually, Sean pinpointed the problem in a series of haunting photographs:

Personally, I do not see the problem.

Eventually, I did get a few visitors, including a man who only wanted the free bookmarks, because he collected them. Bookmarks. He collected bookmarks. My attempts to suggest he might be interested in the novel were fruitless, as they only led him to accuse me of having other, more interesting bookmarks hidden on my person.

In the end, I sweated my way through an hour and a half or so and had a great time in Brooklyn. We had a final pose with my Team of Disreputable Folks, and it was back home to sit and stare at the Kitty Bag in the dark. As usual.

They chased everyone away, I think.