Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

OK, then – I am working at putting the various locations in my books up on an app called Squirl – which allows people to pull together the locations of books set in the place where they are! Since my various characters traveled all over the place, this will take a couple of days. It won’t be quite as detailed as the walking tour of Fredericksburg, Texas – but close enough!

So – the Daughter Unit and I spend the greater part of Monday morning doing our bit for the San Antonio Indy Authors and our second bookfest, this coming Saturday. C.M. Bratton, our tireless organizer for this bookfest and last years’ managed to get us a bit of publicity on the KENS-5 mid-morning show, Great Day SA. What with one thing and another over the years, we’ve been to their studios over on Fredericksburg Road – the last time was for the first bookfest, so the Daughter Unit and I knew the drill. Meet with C. M. and the other authors in the visitor parking lot, draw our special T-shirts, sign in on the guestbook in the lobby, get a badge from the receptionist, be escorted in a group to the studio, and find places for ourselves on the bleachers. I don’t know what it is for Good Morning SA when there isn’t a fairly substantial group of people, but it appears that the guests generally serve as the in-studio audience, and rotate into position when their segment comes up.

All very structured, of course; a snippet of news, a weather and traffic report, and then on to the light and fluffy stuff. Oddly enough, I found this program very comforting after the last couple of weeks of news; a long hot summer of race riots, ISIS coming up with horrible new ways to execute people, Europe melting down over Brexit, rumblings of menace from China and Russia … really, I was beginning to dread turning on the computer of a morning and discovering some fresh hell in the headlines.

So – let’s see; what was a summer Monday on Great Day SA all about? Well, there was a franchise ice cream parlor owner, who demonstrated how to whip up instantly frozen ice cream by using liquid nitrogen. I really couldn’t see from where I was sitting in the bleachers – but it seems that it involves stirring in a dash of liquid nitrogen into the ice cream base. It was just hard to tell, with all the white clouds of vapor, dissolving all over the place. And then – a bit about how to keep dogs comfortable in the summer; the owner of a doggie day care and spa, which has a swimming pool for dogs, was interviewed, with one of her dogs on hand. He was a big brown cupcake of a pit named Moose, who was a bit restless but otherwise well-behaved. There is a special kind doggie ice cream, it appears; a specially formulated frozen whey, which is better for them than cream and sugar.
There were three performers and two puppets from the Magik Theater, and the theater manager, doing a song from their current production; La Cinderella. This is a musical adaptation of the Cinderella story, set in Spanish Colonial San Antonio. And then – a new hospital facility opening up; specializing in physical therapy and rehabilitation – which looks to be quite awesomely well-appointed. The pictures of the lobby looked like the lobby of a particularly luxurious hotel.

And then – our bit, at the end of the hour, with C. M. wrapping it all up and the rest of us holding up our books. Not a bad way to kill a morning, and if it brings out crowds to Say Si on Saturday, then all to the good!

Alas, I only sold a single book, and my daughter swapped a copy of The Chronicles of Luna City for another author’s book – a veteran with an account of a more than comically interesting deployment to Afghanistan. But I had a fair number of talks with other authors looking to work with Watercress Press in facilitating their next book, or a re-issue of a previous book. An ongoing complaint from them was the high cost of getting print copies, the speed of their delivery upon being ordered, the difficulty of working with someone on the other end of an 800 telephone line, or maybe even an erratic email address for a contact who might be anywhere at all, and the recalcitrance of those contacts to address problems … so, I do not think that I will adding to the stable of Watercress Press authors – but I am thinking that there is definitely a future in providing editing or formatting services, cover design, and in walking them through setting up as a teeny independent publisher with an account at LSI, (Lightening Services, International), and assisting them in managing their own account and their own books.

Frankly, LSI offers a perfectly dazzling array of options, once one has threaded the maze, which is what most writers – who only want to write! get rather daunted by. Just as there are very few writers now wanting the expensive full-service and high-quality local printing and binding which Alice so favored, and that we are on the high-end of pricing as far as POD publishing, this will offer an even more affordable option for them – and will keep the post-publication administrative load off me. Most Watercress authors do direct sales; I’m about the only one with regular payments from on-line sales of my print books through LSI/Ingram – and that because I have twelve books out there. The largest portion of my sales are through the ebook versions anyway.

We reacquainted ourselves with a handful of other writers that we met at previous events – Miss T, JC Hulsey, CM Bratton, who is organizing the San Antonio Indy Bookfest next month – but the one big success was my Edwardian walking suit with the absolutely flamboyant hat. Yes, that was eye-catching and memorable; the author at the next table to us said admiringly that I looked like Kathy Bates, playing Unsinkable Molly Brown in the movie Titanic. It was not that uncomfortable to wear, either, although getting into and out of the Montero in a narrow long skirt was a bit of a challenge. The very lightweight polyester suiting was not that hot – and the hat was skewered through my hair done up in a bun on the top of my head with one of those foot-long, needle-sharp old-fashioned hairpins. A genteel lady’s weapon of choice, so I hear tell, although I understand that a tiny, two-shot pearl-handled derringer was not entirely out of the question. I regret that my daughter didn’t take any pictures of me, although others at the event did. I really want to have some professional snaps done, as I am not one of those who naturally looks amazing in front of any old camera lense.

I am definitely going to work up some more late 19^th or early 20^th century outfits to wear as part of my author wardrobe, though. Patterns are ordered already.