OMG. [My thirteen year old rolled her eyes when she saw this in one of my comments, so I thought it should feature prominently in this post.]

Tonight I headed over to my favorite bookstore of all time, Village Books in Bellingham. A friend I’ve never met on the far side of the country sent me a note saying he’d purchased two of my books online from Village Books [they ship them anywhere in the U.S. for only $0.99] and asked me to personalize them. Since I had to take my 13-year-old to a violin lesson and find something to do, rather than sit in a cold car I went to Village Books to personalize them for him. It took a bit to find the copies that were set aside, but we did.

I signed them for JT, an online friend through an internet service once known as Prodigy in a land called the Heinlein Forum. That was in the early 1990s when AOL was at its prime sending out a new CD of download software in a new fancy piece of packaging. Prodigy went the way of Montgomery Wards and the Dodo, but the Heinlein Forum survived the turbulence migrating to other new lands and finally settling in FaceBookland, where JT and I reconnected. He was a reader of some of my earliest published fiction in a fanzine titled: The Galactic Citizen. So, he is definitely one of my oldest fans (sorry, Granny, longest running fans?).

Anyway, I personalized the inscription and asked if there were any of the Bookmarks the say SIGNED BY AUTHOR. There were so I took a few and placed them in the double wide stack in the Young Adult section. Then I went up to the #FantSciFi section upstairs and found only one copy of each of my two books in practically the worst placement in the store. On the bottom shelf about one hand high hiding in the shadow on the end of the shelf! At least my shelf-hanger ebook download cards were visible. You might actually snag your nylon on the plastic shelf-hanger if you weren’t looking. [Not complaining. Village Books has my book in three places in their store. They rock!]

So, I put a Signed by Author card in each of them and went to order a little dinner at Book-Fare, a wonderful little restaurant inside the bookstore. They sell stuff that “cooms in pints.” As I was comparing the porter to the stout, the gentleman and his son who were looking at books in the SciFi/Fantasy section came over with my book in hand. Was I the author? Heck yeah! I gave a quick pitch about what sets it apart from other Post-Apocalyptic novels: realistic, devastating plague, no zombies, and the power stays on. We introduced ourselves and shook hands. The son goes to Sehome High School where I student-taught and substituted and his mother works at the district office. The son also has the great good fortune of working with one of the best high school science teachers in the world, Mr. Chuck Schelle!

So, as my pint came, I personalized their books, They bought both Book I and II! I bid adieu and thanked them for reminding me that I hadn’t donated any copies to the library at Sehome High School [or Squalicum for that matter. Dang it. Or Ferndale High School. Sigh…].

As I paid for my killer fancy grilled cheese and stout, the kind employee said something about me being a celebrity. I smiled and said, “only here.” Then she told me she had just graduated from Sehome and had Mr. Schelle as a science teacher, too, and agreed how awesome he is.

So, here I sit, finishing a lovely dinner, inspired to write a few more words, riding high on a surge of positivity… Watch out small world, here I come. [But please, no need to sing the song… Disney will sue.]