November 14, 2007: Open Mic Night at Barnes and Noble
The other night, Aimee and I scurried over to Barnes and Noble. The place was all but blockaded with tables, each manned by a desperate-looking elderly person with a stack of self-published books to sell.
Welcome to Local Authors Night!
The books ranged from faux Carl Hiassen-Florida mystery novels to pedantic tomes of "lost" histories to romances to...aw, it's too depressing to recount, really.
I saw a big poster showing greyhound types and pointed it out to Aimee. As though preternaturally sensitive to the movement of the air, an elderly woman popped up from behind it and begged us to come over and talk about greyhounds: their history, their significance, their talents, their genetic structure.
By a shocking coincidence, the woman had recently written a book about greyhounds...told from the perspective of the POV greyhound. Conveniently double-spaced for older readers, the book chronicled the entirety of greyhound history from the time the first one oozed out of the sea to the present, this very second. How she told this from the view of a single greyhound, I don't know--though I'll assume the dog was either an academic or a time traveler.
I haven't read enough to know if the prose is written in the short, terse sentences one would expect from a sprinting dog.
Aimee took one for the team and bought one of the books, mostly to get us extracted from the social tar pit and also because the proceeds went to greyhound rescue.
The lesson? Do not engage. Those authors are creepy.
(Later, in the parking lot, we saw that the woman had a severed greyhound head hanging from her rearview mirror.)
(No, that isn't true. But it seems spiritually true.)
