You Don't See Surreal Coming Every Day

 

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

 

 

            Sometimes my life seems a little … surreal.

 

            Like something out of a TV show surreal. One of those TV shows where characters are always doing double takes, and saying things like “that’s new”, or “I did not see that coming”.

 

            For instance, I meet a woman on a writing website, marry her, and then discover she has all the skills needed to design a book package at the exact moment when I happen to delve into the sometimes difficult world of self-publishing. Didn’t see that coming.

 

            Naturally that leads into the already told story of my book signing for said book, and speaking of surreal: It’s been over two years since I did my first book signing, and it’s still weird. Does Stephen King ever look at himself in the mirror and think, “How did all this happen? Wasn’t I just a nobody teaching school, yesterday? Now cartoon versions of me are doing cameos on Fox TV shows.”

 

            Then, being Stephen King, he’d go off and write a story about a writer’s cartoon mirror image doing horrifying things in an isolated Maine cabin.

 

            The morning of this particular signing I had to work until 11 a.m., and it started at noon. I didn’t worry about that, because it was at an entire fire department’s 125^th birthday, and there was lots of stuff besides me going on there. I was a sideshow.

           

( So I arrived, and found someone had already bought a book, and someone else was standing there waiting for me. I put my tote full of book signing stuff down, and signed three books before my wife set stuff up – before I even got a chance to sit down and catch my breath. I signed books for retired fire chiefs, for people from fire departments dozens of miles away, for people I hadn’t seen for years, and for perfect strangers. I signed one for Indiana State Senator Sue Glick, who had no way of knowing if I voted for her. )