October Surprise...at Colville Safeway!

One of the joys of my annual pilgrimages to my Southern California birthplace involves wandering around some of the few remaining brick-and-mortar bookstores with old friends. I'm not-so-secretly pleased when I can tug a book off a shelf and flip to one of my stories.

"Look," I'll say, feigning modesty. "This book has one of my stories!"

 My friends fake astonishment. "How impressive!"

There's not a lot of financial gain in writing true stories about one's life for these books. So why not accept the emotional payoff one gets from preening when one has the chance? Even if one has to stage the scene.

Where I live now, in Stevens County, 70 miles from Spokane, I've never had the opportunity to spy a book with one of my stories in any store. Wal-Mart did carry Chicken Soup for the Soul's Messages from Heaven several months ago...a friend spotted it. By the time I dropped by the store a day later, there were no copies left. I'm hoping a few local readers got to learn how my husband planned to stage a comeback from the afterlife in my story, "The Unforgotten."

But last night, on the way to a jewelry party at a friend's house, I dropped by Safeway to pick up some lettuce and some dog chews. I wandered down the book and magazine aisle and idly cast a glance at the shelves. Lo and behold...Safeway had stocked not one, but TWO, of the new Chicken Soup for the Soul books on health, edited by doctors from Harvard Medical School: Say Goodbye to Back Pain, with my story "Twist and Shout," and Say Hello to a Better Body, with my story "Running Like Sixty."

I scurried over to the checker and asked if I could borrow her assistant who was bagging groceries. The pretty young woman who snapped this photo looked suitably impressed. I basked in my momentary glory, relieved that I was wearing my dressy Marks and Spencer black coat rather my scruffy snow-scene fleece.

Someday I'll get my 15 minutes of fame. Last night I got 15 seconds, but it was sufficient. I'm back at the keyboard today, ego deflated to its normal size, working on editing stories for the upcoming Publishing Syndicate's Not Your Mother's Book...On Travel. This one, due out in late January, will have my name on the cover! One can hardly wait. One plans to splurge with shameless self-promotion.