R-i-i-i-i-p!

Oh, do you wonder what that ripping sound is? Well, I had a book signing at the Coas Bookstore in Las Cruces today. A nice elderly lady named Sandra sat down to chat with me and said she'd buy my book. She hailed a clerk and asked exactly how much my book was with the tax—$16.05, she was told. My, you're going to bankrupt me, she said as she peeled off three twenties. We stopped her from paying $60.05, but by golly, she was about to do it.

Anyway, I signed a copy for her. Then Sandra and I chatted about the Christian missionary work she and her family have done in Yunnan, China; and then she talked about her reading tastes. She likes clean, old-fashioned romance novels, not the modern kind with dirty parts in them. When she gets to a place in a book that has a dirty part, she said, she rips the page out. That didn't seem like the time to go into detail about the book I'd just inscribed to her, which while not exactly dirty, does have a plot that revolves around a porn shop. And there are parts where, um...

She left the store with a small stack of books and assured me she would read mine first. So if you hear the sound of ripping pages, that's Sandra with my book.

The photo shows the sign I displayed using a quote from an Amazon review by Jack Shakely.