Life is Stranger Than Fiction
Day six, and to CostCo outside of San Francisco to sign stock. It's a strange experience. Although we have some 15 branches of CostCo in the UK, I've never seen one or been inside and, to start with, its huge warehouse-like dimensions overwhelm me.
Between the juice and the clothing, there's a mountain of copies of Sepulchre waiting to be signed. Above my head, a huge poster like a medieval banner at the joust. I'm not hopeful. It's Saturday lunchtime and the shop is full of families and young children, tasting food on display, stocking up on industrial sized packs of shampoo, vitamins, oranges, television. It doesn't seem likely that hardback fiction will be at the top of anyone's shopping list ....
I wait. Sign a few copies, wait a little more. Then, gently, readers start to come.
A father about to go on a long air flight to visit he son in Israel buys the first copy. One by one, men or women stop, look at the flyleaf, trying to decide if it's their kind of book, smile and walk away, before turning and deciding to buy it anyway. A man stops, looking utterly dumbstruck, before coming over to the table. An Englishman, it turns out that Labyrinth was one of his mother's favourite novels and he can't quite believe the author is sitting in front of him at CostCo in SF on a Saturday in April.
Finally, the most extraordinary coincidence, when a young woman, an artist, stops. She is a designer of Tarot cards and has just finished a commissioned for the Museum of Bologna. She's already bought Sepulchre, interested in the painted cards - eight of them - at the front of the book, but buys another.
Inspired by medieval imagery, Anissa Morello works to commission and paints individual decks of cards for both herself and for others, and we talk about the coincidence and the serendipity that has brought both of this, to this one spot, in a shopping mall on this busy Saturday afternoon. Later, I visit her website - unicavita.com - and admire her beautiful work and reflect upon the fact that if, as a novelist, I wrote so many moments of chance, of coincidence, of split second, what-if, timings into my novels, my readers would through up their hands in disbelief. As always, life is stranger than art ....
A bientôt.
Kate
Between the juice and the clothing, there's a mountain of copies of Sepulchre waiting to be signed. Above my head, a huge poster like a medieval banner at the joust. I'm not hopeful. It's Saturday lunchtime and the shop is full of families and young children, tasting food on display, stocking up on industrial sized packs of shampoo, vitamins, oranges, television. It doesn't seem likely that hardback fiction will be at the top of anyone's shopping list ....
I wait. Sign a few copies, wait a little more. Then, gently, readers start to come.
A father about to go on a long air flight to visit he son in Israel buys the first copy. One by one, men or women stop, look at the flyleaf, trying to decide if it's their kind of book, smile and walk away, before turning and deciding to buy it anyway. A man stops, looking utterly dumbstruck, before coming over to the table. An Englishman, it turns out that Labyrinth was one of his mother's favourite novels and he can't quite believe the author is sitting in front of him at CostCo in SF on a Saturday in April.
Finally, the most extraordinary coincidence, when a young woman, an artist, stops. She is a designer of Tarot cards and has just finished a commissioned for the Museum of Bologna. She's already bought Sepulchre, interested in the painted cards - eight of them - at the front of the book, but buys another.
Inspired by medieval imagery, Anissa Morello works to commission and paints individual decks of cards for both herself and for others, and we talk about the coincidence and the serendipity that has brought both of this, to this one spot, in a shopping mall on this busy Saturday afternoon. Later, I visit her website - unicavita.com - and admire her beautiful work and reflect upon the fact that if, as a novelist, I wrote so many moments of chance, of coincidence, of split second, what-if, timings into my novels, my readers would through up their hands in disbelief. As always, life is stranger than art ....
A bientôt.
Kate
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