My First Bookstore Event and More Reviews & Media

I had my first bookstore event the other night, at Diesel Books in Oakland. Lovely people, and a good turnout considering that I was competing with the Giants-Nationals game – every once in a while we heard loud cheers or groans from the bar next door. One of the nice things about bookstore events is that you see old friends – so in addition to my daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons (who might have listened to my lecture for 4 or 5 minutes before they started reading Rick Riordan!), I got to see friends from my GD days and lots of new folks, too.

The store people seemed pleased, and although I went too long – I’d like to get my chat down to ½ an hour, but you try condensing a 430 page book into ½ an hour… it was well received.

And the night ended happily for me both as a Giants fan – they won – but I also got to stop off at the Fillmore to hear Lake Street Dive. Good Lord they’re good.

Today brought a fast and fun chat with Murph and Mack at KNBR, the big sports station here in SF – we managed to work in some baseball in amongst the Highway 61 stuff… I’ve known Paulie Mack for a while, but it was the first time I’d ever been interviewed by him. Now I know why he’s in such a high-profile seat – it was as deft and smooth an interview as I’ve had for a while. I had a little more time yesterday with Brad Hockmeyer at KTAO in Taos – and that was exceptional, too. A very warm reception so far.

And yesterday I saw two new reviews, one from The Electric Review, a website I’ve admired for a while, and one from The Huffington Post. They’re both keepers, to put it mildly. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. As I said in the last post, my past experience with reviews led me to not pay much attention, since they seemed about the topic rather than the book…but these two folks read my book, for sure.