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Book store signings strike me as things of the past, except for the isolated few big names in our business who don’t seem to need the boost at all. Lives are busy, schedules conflict, and most of the public’s attention goes only to the best & the biggest who sit atop the cultural pyramid. Who seriously has time to be at a bookstore at 1:00 on a Saturday?

I mean to say: they can be depressing if you aren’t prepared for the inevitable disappointment. 

For punishment, I was forced to stare at a prominent, centrally-located, in-store display of the new children’s book by by literary lion Matthew McConaughey.

I mean to say: This is Gemma and she traveled a good distance to meet me at a bookstore in Schenectady. It’s not nothing. In fact, it’s a lot more than nothing.

She first encountered me on a Zoom thing that Scholastic created around Jigsaw Jones: The Case from Outer Space. She came hoping to buy more Jigsaw Jones titles — there are 14 currently available — but alas, there were none in the store. Sigh, oh sigh. Gemma rallied, however, and grabbed Exit 13: The Whispering Pines. She would not be denied and her mom, from what I could gather, was constitutionally unable to say “no” to a book. 

Thank you, Gemma!

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