The fun never ends
Last night I'm on the phone with Tim, catching up – alternately, we have each been out of town for the last two or three weeks and we haven't seen each other or spoken much in the interim. I'm on the land line, chatting away. Water is starting to boil in the kitchen for dinner, the oven is preheating; I'm looking forward to a little down time that evening before Scott and I take off the next day for Orlando. There we're going to try and corner Bruce Campbell (star of the "Evil Dead" movies and something of an underdog actor) for the purposes of book publicity. Maybe we'll get a picture of him with the book, perhaps even needle him for an endorsement. Sure, it sucks that we'll have to drive round-trip to Orlando on Halloween (braving Ybor City's Guavaween traffic), but such is the life of a self-published author, right?
As I talk to Tim about this and other things, I hear my cell phone ringing from the depths of my backpack. I think about ignoring it, but instead I dig it out and answer, asking Tim to hold on for a second.
It's Scott. That much I can tell from the Caller ID. On the other end of the phone, Scott is making frustrated strangled noises. They're the same noises he makes when he finds out that those DVDs of The Prisoner he has been buying will be collected in a single boxed set priced lower than the sum of the discs individually. I know something's wrong.
"Did you know that Bruce Campbell was going to be in Tampa?" he asks, when the noises are over.
"No! When?" I shoot back. Cool! I think. Maybe we won't have to drive to Orlando after all.
"Right now. Well, technically half an hour from now at the USF Tampa campus."
"That wasn't on his web site last week!"
"Well it is now." Scott has that hopeful ring in his voice. He doesn't want to drive to Orlando tomorrow night either.
"OK, I'm on my way."
Off goes the heat under the boiling water. The preheating oven is de-heated before it gets a chance to actually cook anything. I check the web site and find out that they're showing one of Campbell's films, Army of Darkness, before he speaks. That buys us some time, but we still tear like bats out of hell towards Tampa, stopping only to pick up some cash and some dinner, which we eat in the car. Christina, who had been planning to do laundry, comes along to help navigate the campus. So much for down time.
We did eventually get a couple of additional books into Mr. Campbell's hands and he did acknowledge that he had received the book we sent earlier, but he gave no indication that he'd even glanced at it, much less enjoyed it. I felt a little sheepish asking for an endorsement when I was getting the "I'm busy and I have 200 more people for whom to sign things" vibe from Campbell, so I settled for a picture of him reading the book instead. (Kudos to Christina, who handled the camera.) He signed my "Book of the Dead" edition of Evil Dead, and I bid him a good night.
We made some contacts, ran into the guy from Movie Poop Shoot who had come to our Zardoz screening, and seeded a few copies into the crowd. If nothing else comes from it, at least we saved ourselves a trip to Orlando tonight.
As I talk to Tim about this and other things, I hear my cell phone ringing from the depths of my backpack. I think about ignoring it, but instead I dig it out and answer, asking Tim to hold on for a second.
It's Scott. That much I can tell from the Caller ID. On the other end of the phone, Scott is making frustrated strangled noises. They're the same noises he makes when he finds out that those DVDs of The Prisoner he has been buying will be collected in a single boxed set priced lower than the sum of the discs individually. I know something's wrong.
"Did you know that Bruce Campbell was going to be in Tampa?" he asks, when the noises are over.
"No! When?" I shoot back. Cool! I think. Maybe we won't have to drive to Orlando after all.
"Right now. Well, technically half an hour from now at the USF Tampa campus."
"That wasn't on his web site last week!"
"Well it is now." Scott has that hopeful ring in his voice. He doesn't want to drive to Orlando tomorrow night either.
"OK, I'm on my way."
Off goes the heat under the boiling water. The preheating oven is de-heated before it gets a chance to actually cook anything. I check the web site and find out that they're showing one of Campbell's films, Army of Darkness, before he speaks. That buys us some time, but we still tear like bats out of hell towards Tampa, stopping only to pick up some cash and some dinner, which we eat in the car. Christina, who had been planning to do laundry, comes along to help navigate the campus. So much for down time.
We did eventually get a couple of additional books into Mr. Campbell's hands and he did acknowledge that he had received the book we sent earlier, but he gave no indication that he'd even glanced at it, much less enjoyed it. I felt a little sheepish asking for an endorsement when I was getting the "I'm busy and I have 200 more people for whom to sign things" vibe from Campbell, so I settled for a picture of him reading the book instead. (Kudos to Christina, who handled the camera.) He signed my "Book of the Dead" edition of Evil Dead, and I bid him a good night.
We made some contacts, ran into the guy from Movie Poop Shoot who had come to our Zardoz screening, and seeded a few copies into the crowd. If nothing else comes from it, at least we saved ourselves a trip to Orlando tonight.




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