Can I just tell you something, just between us?
This – this – is one of the thrills of my life.
Standing in a bookstore, surrounded by stacks of books?
Yes. This. Standing in Seattle Mystery Bookshop, with stacks of my book: Death al Dente, first in the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries.
This morning, I started counting. I needed all my fingers and most of my toes to figure out when I started writing mysteries. Along the way, there have been many adventures, half a dozen or so published short stories, and a published nonfiction book for writers, Books, Crooks & Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law & Courtroom Procedure (Quill Driver Books, 2011).
Oh, and an Agatha Award for Best Nonfiction. Another thrill, no question.
But is there any writer aiming for publication who doesn’t envision that first bookstore signing? Her name on the schedule, on the website, on a placard outside? And that stack of books, on a table, waiting for her?
Seattle Mystery Bookshop was a haunt of mine in the last year or two before I left Seattle and moved back to my native Montana. When Mr. Right and I visit the city, we go pay homage. (We also go to Emerald City Guitars. We have an egalitarian marriage.) SMB is just what a mystery bookshop ought to be: tucked on a sidehill in the earliest surviving section of town, with windows full of posters for books, and inside? Oh, inside. Shelves and shelves and tables and shelves and nooks and crannies and shelves of books.
And people who love them and know them all, backwards and forwards.
And that table and chair, waiting for the writers who come to sign.
Thank you, SMB. Thank you, readers, who let me talk to you about my book and took it home with you. I hope it gave you a few hours of enjoyment, of pleasure in discovering a mysterious little corner of Northwest Montana.
Because it gives me a thrill to share it with you.
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