The Big Day.

I woke up on the morning of my signing feeling deranged with nerves, missing the shuttle when my shaking hands resulted in a dramatic mascara wand mishap and I had to wash my makeup off and start from scratch.

Here I am, averting my eyes so that you will not see the CRAZY! in them:

It helped that it was a beautiful, if blisteringly hot, day, and that I had a view of the Chrysler Building from my hotel room window. So much prettier than the Empire State Building. Height isn’t everything, you know.

It also helped that in the cab on the way to the convention center my phone buzzed, and I got the following photograph via text from my mother-in-law:

This baby has only a bucket to shield her from the elements. A naked baby doll and piece of discarded Tupperware are her sole companions. For only three cents a day, you could at least buy her a bigger bucket. Won’t you please help?

Javits Center is huge. HUGE. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, but when I entered to find myself in what appeared to be a multi-level warehouse the size of two train stations, with banks of escalators before me carrying bookbag-laden people from floor to floor, I was rendered motionless, and tried to look nonchalant while I waited for my publicist to fetch me. My publicist, Nicole, is a tiny and formidably accomplished seventeen-year-old. Oh, ok, she is older than that—eighteen, maybe. I kid, but she doesn’t seem old enough to account for her job experience and easy, confident competence. I’m a little intimidated by her, honestly. She is one of those put-together people who instantly make me feel I am about to trip over something or possibly accidentally set my handbag on fire.

I was fetched, and given my badge.

You will notice it says “AUTHOR.” (Do you think real author-authors get to a point where they can see themselves referred to as “AUTHOR” without an internal giggle of disbelief? I doubt it.)
I also took a copy of the special “Show Daily” edition of Publisher’s Weekly, a giant glossy thing that looks like this:

…and which I opened to find a full page ad taken out by Perseus (my publisher, or rather Ur-publisher) to promote their author events. Like mine.

See me? Above EMPIRE OF ILLUSION and next to ALEX AND THE IRONIC GENTLEMAN? Also, please note that the sort of border at the top of the page made up of tiny little book covers has mine in it. This was all very exciting.

Even more exciting was what I saw when the escalator spit us out upstairs onto the convention floor and into the gigantic Perseus area in the center: a long wall of light-up marquee sort of things, like they have for movies.

Holy SHIT, you guys:

From about this point on, I was just a floating, disbelieving, grinning presence. I bobbed on over to the booth, sat at a table, and began signing my name to things. I did this for a couple of hours, and it was wonderful. Some notes:

• They gave me a Sharpie to sign with, which is apparently Standard Signing Equipment, but made me feel a little rude, as if I were defacing the books with graffiti—tagging them, if you will. It felt scandalous to write in someone else’s copy like that. (Of course, I am also the person who gasped and then fiercely scolded a friend when I entered a room to see her book splayed gruesomely on its SPINE.) (I could hear its feeble screams!)
• I signed willy-nilly, on whichever of the first non-text-y pages I happened to open up to, until one woman made me do hers over and informed me that the PROPER place to sign is the title page, NOT the half-title. Remember this, all of you.
• I never did think of anything clever to write. I mostly stuck with “For X” and my name, and added my profuse thanks verbally. (Indeed, I felt misty with gratitude the whole time.)
• Apparently, not every author asks how a name is spelled before signing, which surprised me to hear. I got a lot of “Oh! Thank you for asking!” and a wide variety of spellings. I asked because how annoying would it be, if you are a Cathy, to have a book signed to Kathy instead? My inscriptions may not be clever, but at least they are correct. Maybe that will be my thing?
• If I saw that the person I was signing for was a librarian, I sometimes wrote “Thank you for being a librarian!” before my name. I think I may have frightened a few librarians with my enthusiasm for their profession. (“Oh!” I kept crying gleefully, “You’re a LIBRARIAN!”) In case they are reading now, allow me to explain: When I was in elementary school, I had a particularly wonderful librarian, Mrs. Freuhling, who encouraged my writing—and advocated leniency during the meeting with the principal after I was discovered to be sneaking books home without checking them out. (There was a rule in place that you could check out only as many books per week as the grade you were in, which was not enough to keep me supplied with reading material. I was sneaking the books back INTO the library when I’d finished, but it was slow going, and after I was caught everyone was shocked by the quantity I’d accumulated.) Most importantly, Mrs. Freuhling convinced the staff of the daycare center in which I was confined after school to let me stay down the hall with her, shelving books and learning about the Dewey Decimal System. I spent many happy afternoons filing cards in the catalogues, pushing carts amongst the shelves, and stamping things carefully with the date, and I will always have a bit of cardiac real estate reserved for librarians. My dream job, before the Internet came along and ruined it, was to man the kind of reference desk where a person could wander in (or phone) with some obscure question about, say, renaissance undergarments, and I would find the answer for them. (And while I love computers, I will never forgive them for taking away my precious, precious card catalogues.)
• I felt bad for the pregnant women who picked up a copy of my book, or the people who had me sign theirs to someone they knew who was expecting. (“Maybe for AFTER the baby’s born,” I suggested.)
• Often someone would come up to me and launch into a sales pitch or question, not realizing (despite the stack of books and poised Official Signing Sharpie) that I was only an author and thus of no use to them.
• Sometimes someone would stop, pick up the book, read the back, (“It’s free!” I’d say helpfully) and then put it down and walk away.
• A shocking number of delivery men came by with menus from their restaurants (mostly Chinese, a few Thai). I take it they were making the rounds. How did they get in, I wonder?
• I began the day explaining to everyone who took a copy how ROUGH the ARC was, and how much BETTER the final version is, and how MANY EDITS AND FIXINGS I have made since the galleys were printed, but stopped when it became clear that this was frowned upon by my petite publicity powerhouse, who was also much better than I at summing up the book in a few sentences without stammering or saying disturbing things like “It’s about my daughter’s premature birth and time in the hospital—but it’s funny!” and since she was right THERE I mostly let her field the questions. It is clear that I need to work on being able to discuss my book myself. It shouldn’t be so hard. I did write the damn thing, after all.
• I felt so unfettered and celebratory, more so than I had since turning in the manuscript. I met the most delightful people, too—the sales reps were lovely! And the publisher is this very tall, kind man who said the nicest things about my book. I was struck, again, by how uncommonly lucky I have been. In the cab back to the hotel I kept marveling that any of it was real.

Me, Nicole (my aforementioned publicist), and my editor Jen. Photo blatantly stolen from Running Press’ Facebook page