Eggs Over Easy

Damn! I missed the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I was psyched about the chance to hobnob and rub elbows with fellow readers and writers. I even talked to a group about getting space in their booth to promote Death-Defying Nina, but then I wasn’t sure how to handle selling an eBook. Maybe I could collect the dough and then whisk them a copy to their portable readers, something like that. I thought about constructing some books. I’ve done it before, ran off the manuscript onto three-hole paper and bound the pages with brads like a screenplay. At a hundred and twenty pages, DDN is similar in length to a movie script. Technically, it’s a novella. In reality, it’s a chapter of my life I wish never happened. But it did and I wrote about it and with proceeds from book sales going to the ALS Society I don’t mind trying to sell, sell, sell. Anyway, thanks to snafus and snarled traffic the opportunity to meet and talk with a live audience slid by.

I suppose I already have the wide world at my disposal 24/7, so no real reason to interface with humanity. These days I’m a reluctant extrovert. But since my pal and personal cheerleader Ms. Laura Joakimson had worked hard to make me some promo postcards to pass out at the festival I wanted to make the effort. I imagined flying into Kinko’s and firing off a few hundred copies onto cardstock then buzzing over to the book fest. Just so happened that same day 7.5 miles of the downtown core was blocked for another event, “CicLAvia.” As described on their website, “CicLAvia creates a temporary park for free, simply by removing cars from city streets.” In spirit I support the idea of taking back the pavement, only the pop-up park picked a bad place to pop up. Frustrated drivers tried in vain to flee the maze of cordoned-off streets, traffic gridlocked and minor fender benders had irate motorists circling their vehicles snapping pictures of scratches and dents with their cell phones. Meanwhile, bikes and baby strollers, rollerbladers, skate boarders, joggers, and dog walkers fought their way through the cars, trucks, and stretch limos that jammed the intersections between the auto-free zones.

I called Laura to talk me down from pulling a Michael Douglas, à la Falling Down. I bitched and moaned and told her I didn’t think I’d make it to the book festival. I’d decided if I survived the next four blocks to the first possible exit I was going to find a place to eat breakfast. I’d scrap the storyline I’d sketched out for my day and do a rewrite over a cup of coffee and a plate of eggs. Besides, deep down I didn’t really want to go to the book fest. It’s become apparent that the skill set needed to self-promote is discrete from that needed for self-expression. Clearly I’m deficient. In romancing a career as a novelist, I never pictured myself wearing a sandwich board and passing out handbills. And though that day I didn’t sell a single copy of Death-Defying Nina, sitting in a diner scribbling notes on a napkin at least I felt like a writer.