Festival Hangover

Interior by Escher much?

It's not like going to Suwannee or Coachella, but there is a definite sense of "morning after" with a book festival. 

Bookish festivals are less Bacchanalia, more tea-party, in my experience. Rarely do we experiment with questionable dance moves or off-script substances. Communal toilets, however, are common to both. 

Oh, did I guzzle a big honking glass of wine at the end of the day? Yes, but I wasn't hung over that way.

Did I get dehydrated in the interest of reducing trips to the ladies'? I did. It was a choice.

Was it either freezing cold or slightly sweaty at all times? Indeed it was, and I should have worn my wool skirt with the deep pockets and the flannel petticoat, because I—a volcano under most circumstances—was on the edge of shivering all day. ​

None of this physical fiddle-faddle plays into it. What gives me the morning-after feels is the overload of stories. So. Many. Stories.  

Get us together and writers know how writers are; we're all playing with paper dolls in our rooms. So even the shy ones are willing to talk about why they write what they write, confident that ain't nobody gonna cast stones in this big glass house.

At the mixer before the event, I consider the crowd and think: it's almost as if the authors themselves fall into genres: The ones who do it for the children in their circle, the ones who want to share their history, the ones who want to shoehorn their lifetime's expertise into the setting of a cozy mystery. ​

Putting aside for a moment what drives them, I should be ashamed to admit how the optics play out for me: the man straight out of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a rheumy eye affixed upon the hapless wedding guest.  I couldn't keep looking away from that tiny masked lady who wore enough purple marabou to render her into a child-sized, dyed Easter chick.

Truly, it's my failure getting stuck on appearances. I might have learned their stories rather than allowing them to write themselves in my imagination. That's on me.

But the stories I did not (could not?) make up: The generous sci-fi author who asked gently if I wanted feedback on my website. Bless him for actually looking at it! And he was right: it needed a stronger focus on the book itself rather than on chatty old me. Alert readers will spot the new section "Reviews and Awards" on the landing page.

The children snubbed up like a boat under tow to a parental flank, being hustled past my spot, their gazes pulled like magnets to the bowl of Smarties next to my Venmo sign. 

The surprising number of people determined NOT to look at anything as they attempted to move along the center of the narrow aisles. Nope, not even their screens. Just eyes forward and feet moving, as if they were in a bad neighborhood at night.

The weekend's highlight? Well, after seeing the sweet faces of some Tampa friends, it would be...

That reader with the expensive hair and a fluffy dog under her arm who spoke with the dizzying frankness of someone who has been drunk for a very long time: "Where are the vampire books? Seriously! Where?"
They weren't, she assured me, in Sci-Fi or Fantasy.
"Did you check the romance area?" I offered.
She hooted in derision. I kid you not even a little bit. The fluffy dog did not react to the hooting. It might have been stuffed.
There ensued a longish, loopy discussion of Dracula, Renfield, and something about Stoker being her celebrity crush. As she meandered off, she said, "Can you tell I was an English teacher?" 

I worked as a meeting-planner for a bit. IYKYK.

I actually love stuff like that: I mean not much weirder, but that weird was perfect.

Especially since I was sitting under a cloud this year. My near neighbors each had a beef about something. One griped about the day, the table, the event, the lack of customers. And so forth. Another muttered darkly about which passers-by needed to get on Ozempic. Et cetera. Et cetera.

​A Pollyanna, golden-retriever-at-heart, glass-half-full person had her work cut out keeping upbeat.

The first sale of the day—thanks, Heather!

As a pre-tween, I was pressed into use as a tiny servitor at my grandparents' cocktail parties. I think most of the cousins were. I'm grateful, decade after decade, to have had this early job. It was useful not only in teaching me that gimlets* aren't the same as martinis, but also at fostering a layer of social callus. 

*Ask me how long it took for me to differentiate between "gimlets" and "giblets." Stir "gauntlet" and "gibbet" into that confusing mix as well. 

To earn Mimi and Bompa's approval as a waist-high moppet, one had to go ahead and give up the idea of being timid. It meant asking random adults the obvious question about what they wanted to drink, and then listening to what else they say. If they said something incomprehensible or uncomfortable, deflect and move along. ​

We were trying to make this look like a normal customer-booth experience. Sigh.

Or in the case of this book festival weekend—being tethered to the table under a cirrus-puff of grievances—deflect and attempt to chat up any readers within reach. It made for a loooong day.  

On the plus side, I got to ramble in Payne's Prairie a bit on the way up, share meals with a couple of button-bright youngsters of my acquaintance, and visit two very nice bookstores in Gainesville.

​Aw, that glass is lovely! And it's nearly half full!​

Note the "Privacy Please" magnet. Dude, how tall do you imagine the housekeeping staff to be?