Book Signings, Chest Pains, Kids, and Thinking About The Future...

Yesterday I ventured into the city. I drove to the studio with the kids and met Jethro, and from there we drove across the busiest 14 lane highway in the world to get to Yorkdale Mall, which is visible from the highway but pretty darn hard to get into. We wiggled our way through the crowd to the huge, massive, two storey Indigo Books store...where up in the kid's section, Adrienne Kress was reading her new book to an appreciative audience and later signing the book!

ALEX AND THE IRONIC GENTLEMAN is that book. And it's gorgeous. The illustrations, the paper quality, the font, everything, just class all the way. It's about a tomboyish girl who has to go rescue her favourite teacher after he's been kidnapped by pirates. I mean, how much fun is that???!!!

Check out Adrienne's website because it's a whole lot of fun. I found her blog about a year ago, and have followed her journal from Being Excited About The Upcoming Novel to It's A Real Novel In Britain to Here It Is IT'S IN CANADA AND THE U.S. NOW!!! I'm really happy for her, because she's put in the work and come up with a book to be proud of.

Since I don't actually live in the sticks at this point in my life, I felt it was worth it to brave traffic from the passenger seat and go check out the big event. I stood in line clutching my copy of the book, marveling at how many people were there! HOly smokes! I mean, that mall is a zoo- a very expensive looking zoo- and I wondered if all those people were there to see Adrienne! If not, they should have! When it was my turn to get the autograph, I introduced myself (she knew I was planning to show up) and turned my head and put my arm over my face so she'd recognize me! haha!

It was really cool to meet, in real life, a blog person! We're all real people behind our tiny profile pictures!

I had time to measure my own anxiety and consider what I'd be like in her situation. I'd be a mess, sure, but I'd be loving it. Isn't this what we writers want? We want readers! We spend so much time pecking away at this keyboard, and to have some appreciation must be such a buzz.

I do intend to find out for myself.

After the book signing of course, we had to go check out the Apple store, where I found the New Computer of My Future, which I dialled up HICK CHIC on, scrolled down so that the top of the screen had a string of beautiful horse pictures and the bottom of the screen featured Johnny Depp's gorgeous face...and then split! Mwa ha ha ha ha! I should have done that to every available computer in the store! Heh heh heh!

If you have kids, get this book! Heck, get it even if you don't have kids. I actually had enough self control to not crack it open right there on the spot, because I am saving it for this evening, when the kids and I will read it together. We still do that, even if they're 13 and 11 now. Reading together is fun and more time efficient!


To finish off the day, I sat on the couch with Mac White and pounded out five pages of a very difficult project that I'm working on now. I've actually got two new ones on the go. This one is so unpleasant and so much nastier than the cuss-word-filled opus that I'm sending out now. This one is awkward and tense and nasty and those five pages last night just set me off. I'm ready. It's ON.

Today one of my favourite authors, Neil Gaiman, has posted a very interesting blog entry. Even famous writers have to write. And we all sometimes struggle until something flicks the switch and turns it ON.

And now I must hop in my pickup truck and make my rounds. I gotta do a thing at a place and spend some cash and mail a really good book to a person who lives somewhere I'm not.