Oh-oh the Wells Fargo Wagon is A-Coming

by Stephanie Black

Fool Me Twice has been released! Hooray! So now I am awaiting . . . the UPS truck!

I like UPS trucks. We see a lot of them at Christmastime when we do some online shopping, but even when I haven’t ordered anything and it isn’t anywhere near Christmas or my birthday (so I know no one is sending me a present) UPS trucks are still cool. And now I’m expecting the most exciting package of all—a box of author’s copies of my new book.

There’s nothing quite like that moment when you open the box and take out your book—it’s here! It’s real. With my first book, I remember how amazing it was to flip through the pages and see MY words printed on the pages of a BOOK! Those words I’d typed in my word processor were now between two covers, just like the books I saw in bookstores or at the library. I was published! Wahoo!

So in the next few days, maybe I’ll experience an adrenaline-laced moment when I see the brown truck driving up the street and . . . it’s . . . stopping . . . at . . . the neighbor’s house. Phooey. Or I’ll come home from grocery shopping and—can it be?—a box on my porch . . . is it my books? I’ll trip over my children and scatter boxes of cereal and cartons of eggs over the lawn in my haste to examine the box. Or no—I’ll feign casual coolness. “Oh, a box? Hmm, it’s probably a bag of sea salt and some non-diastatic malt powder for Dad’s bread-baking. Well, I suppose (checking my watch) that I’ve got time (yawn) to go see what it is.”

When the books arrive, I should film the moment for posterity, except my posterity would be probably spend the film giggling at early twenty-first century fashions (sort of the way my children react now to those early nineties photos when a permanent wave had given me what we call “Triangle Hair.”) Besides, chances are that when the box arrives, I’ll be wearing a salsa-stained shirt from lunch, no makeup and my hair will be weird (but not triangular).

I think I’ll stage a photo later. I’ll dress up nicely, empty half a bottle of hairspray onto my head, kneel next to the box and have my daughter snap a photo of me taking out a book. Then I’ll send the picture to my sister and she’ll Photoshop it so I have Cindy Crawford hair and Julia Roberts lips, and so on. Then I’ll post it on my website. Of course, this could raise awkward questions when readers meet me in person (“So . . . that picture on your website. Was that, like, taken fifteen years ago? And is it of someone else?”) But oh well. Who says photos need to be true-to-life? I specialize in fiction.