Nine Years Ago Today
I launched my last novel…
At Montreal’s venerable Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, which just happens to be my neighborhood bookstore (lucky me — it’s truly a great place, one of this city’s treasures). I remember there was a lot of beer. My publishers indulged me. So much beer that there was a lot left over and I told the bookstore employees to keep them. They weren’t sure what to do — but I hope they partied a bit.
I did a reading but as a very bad PowerPoint presentation, which was thematically adjacent to the story but worked. That PPT was also posted to places like Slideshare (it’s still there) and as a video, again badly done on purpose (and the video is still up on YouTube).
A few weeks later I would repeat the process (more or less) in Toronto. Then I went to New York to hand out pizza on the sidewalk outside the Javits Center to bewildered passersby. Book Expo! Our booth at the convention was around the corner of a very big publisher and they had Angelica Huston signing autographs and, well, I’m no Angelica Huston. I’ve never even met Jack Nicholson let alone sleep with him.
I did not think back then that it would be a decade before my next novel was…
