Chapter 7: The book signing

They have a box of Sharpie markers waiting for me to sign books with. Usually, there’s also a healthy supply of copies of the book, but the convention didn’t supply those. I guess they expected people to bring the books themselves. I have a couple dozen free copies, but those I usually send to friends and family, so I didn’t bring any with me. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be a problem.

My favorite part of book signings is getting to talk to the fans. Of course, that’s also my least favorite part. Invariably, someone asks me about sequels. I don’t like sequels. I don’t like writing them, I don’t like reading them.

There are exceptions. I have a whole group of books about this guy David Basheer. He’s the world’s most perfect thief, sort of, and there are about half a dozen books starring him. I also have a quartet about a man who is reincarnated every time he is killed. But those are special exceptions. The books about David are sequels, sort of, but they’re more of a series, books that are intended to be about his continuing adventures. And the books about Ash, the man who is reincarnated, were written originally as one book, and only became a quartet when I went to the rewrite stage and started adding scenes. Normally speaking, no sequels for me.

Sure enough, I haven’t signed five books before the first time the question gets asked. “Why don’t you ever write sequels to your sci fi books?”

I’ve spent time thinking about this. Time trying to come up with an answer. I kind of have to. I get asked it so often; I need an answer that people will actually believe.

I look at the guy asking the question. A part of me wishes he was the typical science fiction fan. But he isn’t. He smells just fine, he’s not overweight, and there’s not a stitch of Star Trek paraphernalia on him. Okay, I know that’s biased, but it’s an image I have. Anyway, he looks rather intelligent, so I don’t feel like I’ll be explaining over his head. “I tend to write only the most important event in people’s lives,” I tell him. “And once I’ve chronicled that, I like to leave the rest of the important events in their lives to you. I like you to think up where they go from there. That way, everyone gets different stories. All I do is introduce you to the characters.”

“That’s a nice explanation,” the guy said. “But it’s bullshit.”

I am getting mildly irked. “What’s your name?” I ask. I always ask that before I sign a book. That way, I can actually write something. Usually it’s formulaic. You know, ‘nice meeting you Shelly’ or ‘best of luck Dave’ or some crap like that. It stops them from selling the autograph. And it’s more personal. Sometimes, though, I get weird and write other things.

“Jason Olson,” the guy shifts his weight, scratches his chin. “Do you ever consider writing a sequel?”

I look up at him; my pen already finished scribbling his name. “Not really,” I tell him. No point in more bullshit. “Sometimes I wonder what happens, but usually I feel bad trying to write more.”

“Why?”

“I’m not a nice man to my characters,” I tell him. It’s true. He didn’t even ask me why I don’t write horror sequels. He knows why. No one ever survives my horror novels. Not intact anyway. “By the end of the book, I’ve done so many terrible things to them that I think they deserve a break. They deserve to have the rest of their lives go on without me interfering.”

Jason smiles. “Now that, I do believe,” he says.

I chuckle. Of course he believes that. It’s the truth. I write, ‘keep searching for truth,’ then sign my name.

Time goes by, and my hand starts to hurt. That always happens. It happens when I’m typing for too long, it happens when I’m writing by hand for too long, and it happens when I’m signing my name for too long. It’s carpal tunnel syndrome, basically. It hurts, I stretch out my hand a bit, and I go on with it for as long as I can manage. Then I massage my hand, at the base of the palm, underneath where the pinky is. I massage, and—never mind. I can tell this is boring.

Back to the convention.

It is, unfortunately, usually men who come and have me sign their books. For some reason, women don’t read quite as much of what I write as I would like. Everyone always says I write women very well, and yet I don’t seem to have that many female fans. There are a good number, probably disproportionately so, who do come and ask for autographs, but its still predominately men.

On those rare occasions when a woman does ask for me to sign her book, I tend to talk to her for a little bit longer. Partially, this is because I am a man, and therefore both horny and stupid. I want time to have a decent sexual fantasy about this woman. Mostly, though, it’s because I hope she will say something about how well or poorly I write women. I know that I write men fairly well, as I am one myself. But I have never been a woman, so I’m always interested in their perspective. And I’m not sure I believe what the critics say.

“I was so upset when Cyndy died,” this woman, Carol, was saying to me. “I understand it, and I suppose it was necessary, but I felt so bad. She had just come into her own as a character, was just starting to really develop, and you killed her.”

“Yeah,” I say. “It had to be then. Just before she achieved her goals, just before she became a complete person. That was when she had to die.”

“I suppose it’s like Helen said. Writers are cruel people.”

I need to go on a tangent for a second. Carol just mentioned Helen. Helen is Helen Cassidy, and she’s a character in one of my books. My first horror novel, actually. Helen was a writer who was at a writing seminar, and ended up going crazy and dying (as most characters in my horror novels tend to do). In the process, though, she several times spoke about what it was like to be a writer, what the thought process was. At the time, I was very much still a novice, as was she, and so her voice was really my voice.

The book was written purely as journal entries. In one of the entries, she mentions how writers are the most cruel of people, because we create characters that are as real as possible, put them in the best situations we can, give them a good life and a wonderful starting position, and then do the best we can to systematically destroy everything and everyone they hold dear, all for the entertainment of others. That’s what Carol is talking about.

Which means Carol is a fan of not just my science fiction work, but also of my horror. A very clever and subtle way of letting me know that. “We are indeed,” I say. “Do you write much, Carol?” It’s a stupid question. This is a writing convention, isn’t it? Of course she’s a writer. We’re all writers here. On the other hand, whether or not she considers herself a writer is still up for debate. So maybe it isn’t all that stupid.

“I write a bit,” she says. “Mostly just short stories. I’ve never written a novel. I don’t think I ever could.”

“I think if you really pushed, you’d find it easier than you think,” I tell her. In her book, I write a somewhat lengthy note: “Carol: don’t think of it as one eighty thousand word story. Think of it as ten eight thousand word stories. Or twenty four thousand word stories. That’s what chapters are for. Best of luck, Brandon Weiss.”