It's Beginning to look a lot like Christmas . . .

I was wandering around Barnes & Noble in my usual Christmas daze – Who ARE these people I’ve known half my life? What do they like to read? Do they even LIKE to read? What does any of this have to do with Bethlehem and peace and love and pecan pie ANYway? – and I saw the most amazing thing! My blurb on the back of Chris Carter’s new book. I mean, I knew I wrote one. I knew I read the book and e-mailed my response back to the publisher. Still, to see my NAME there, my own personal gut reaction, my fear, spelled out in black and white (orange, actually) was really exciting.

In fact, I was SO excited, I had to tell someone. There were throngs of people there, crowding the aisles, but no dawdlers in that section. There wasn’t anyone I could just casually tell, “Oh. Huh. You might try this one. I read it. Actually, I read it and then I blurbed it. See? Right over here . . .” It wasn’t that kind of crowd. Everyone seemed a little desperate, glazed eyed, rushed.

Finally, I walked up to the guy managing the lines to the cashiers. “I wrote this!” I announced, pointing to my blurb. He looked at me like I’d gone a little mad, but this was clearly not his first rodeo. He’d seen what Christmas shopping can do to people, make them think they wrote books written by Chris Carter, who isn’t even the same gender, actually. “Ohhhhh,” he said, and then he looked again and saw my name, and since I’ve been in that store to visit THE POCKET WIFE on the shelf many times, he caught on. I told him I just had to tell someone and he laughed and turned around to point the next person in line to the next available cashier and I danced out into the parking lot with my jumble of gifts.