July is Blog Touring Month

The Elusive Mr. McCoy released on July 3^rd, and as a result, I'm blog touring this month.

While not quite as glamorous as a real book tour—no first class air travel, no five-star hotels, no minibars stocked with twenty-five-year-old scotch, no gauntlets of adoring fans stretching pleading hands across the linked arms of buff police officers lining the sidewalk between my limo and the entrance to…

Oh sorry! Got a tad distracted there. Where was I? Okay, I remember. Take two:

While not quite as glamorous as a real book tour, blog touring has two advantages:  

1)   I will have opportunities to use all kinds of material I could not put into the book.

2)   I will meet people from all over the world and none of us have to get out of our jammies.

It is, however, much more demanding than my normal lackadaisical, whenever-I-feel-like-it approach to blogging, so this is the last post you’ll see here until August, by which time I should be recovered. If you really have a need-to-read, the tour schedule is posted on my webpage, and links will go up on my Facebook page as the tour blogs come out.

Until August.     

   

And The Winners Are…

Today was a special day for two reasons:

1.    Summer solstice

2.    Giveaway day for advance copies of The Elusive Mr. McCoy.

The drawing of the winners was done at lunchtime by Wen, my long-suffering life-long friend. We normally go to the Asian buffet, but due to record-breaking heat and humidity, we opted for Ricky’s Diner, a venue famous for its Antarctic air conditioning—which happened to be broken today.

Long ago, Wen had heatstroke and the experience left an indelible impression on her psyche. Because of this, I would not have objected had she balked at the restaurant door and suggested we have our drawing lunch on another, hopefully cooler day. But knowing you were anxiously awaiting the results of the drawing, Wen, with selfless stoicism, followed the hostess to a booth and ordered a glass of water with extra ice cubes which she fished from the glass and ran across the back of her neck as we read the menu.

In order to ensure absolute impartiality in selecting the winners, I used numbers instead of names on the little slips of paper I prepared for Wen to draw.  I scrunched the little slips of paper into little balls of paper, and placed the little balls of paper into a black velvet bag that once held a bottle of perfume  purchased at the duty free shop in Stockholm airport.

After Wen ordered the Philly steak and I ordered the Cajun cream shrimp, I pulled the black velvet bag from my purse and handed it to her. With solemnity appropriate to the momentous nature of the occasion, Wen grinned at me as she reached into the bag. One by one, she extracted five paper balls. She unfolded the last one, said, “Seven,” and looked at me inquiringly.

This was the exact moment when I realized Wen's selection was even more impartial than I'd originally intended. “I don’t know who that is,” I confessed. and went on to explain that I had made up the little paper balls based on the number of people who had entered, but hadn't actually assigned the numbers to any names yet. 

Wen said nothing, just gave me the you-idiot look she patented at age 16 when she tried to teach me how to drive and I crashed her mother’s car into a telephone pole.

After Wen drove me home, I created a spreadsheet of all the entrants, reverse sorted it by date and time of entry, and sequentially assigned numbers to the resulting list. At which point I discovered that one of the winners lives close enough for hand delivery. This savings on postage allowed me to pull an additional number from the black velvet bag, which is why I am delighted to announce the names of the SIX people who will soon be receiving advance copies of The Elusive Mr. McCoy:

Polly

Steve

Vanessa

Veronika

Charlene

Helen

Congratulations to the winners. I’ll be sending you all an email as soon as I finish this post.

And many thanks to everyone for playing along.

Another First on the Writer’s Road

No one likes change. It’s unnerving, embarrassing, sometimes downright painful. But the truth is, if we want to achieve our dreams, every once in a while we must at least dip our toes into the waters of the unknown. Just such an opportunity has presented itself, and I have decided to seize it, ever so gingerly, with the tips of the fingernails on my right thumb and forefinger.

As part of my publishing contract, I am entitled to receive a few free copies of my books. The freebies for my second book arrived yesterday in a box that was only slightly ripped (which probably happened in customs) and minimally water damaged (which probably happened during the torrential rains we had earlier this week). Now I wrote this book, so I already know how it ends and don’t need to read it. Even if I did need to read it, one copy would be more than sufficient for this purpose. Which raises the question of what to do with the rest of them.

Some will go to my beta readers and critique buddies with the usual eternal-gratitude scribblings defacing the title page. Others are committed to a silent auction being held in support of the Gather the Women convention taking place at a nearby university this summer. A few of them are destined for local reviewers.

But this still leaves me with several copies of a book I’m not going to read. I considered binding them with duct tape to make door stops for some of the folks on this year’s Christmas list. I thought about using one as a paperweight, and perhaps putting a couple more in the outhouse as emergency supplies. However, I’m fairly certain the publisher will strongly object to these usages and may never send me another freebie again.  

So instead, I’ve decided to plunk my miniscule marketing budget into snail-mail, and am delighted to announce my first ever contest* in which I will be giving away copies of… (drum roll  please)...

to five lucky people whose names will be randomly drawn on June 20^th by the hand of my oldest friend and treasured beta-reader, Wen, who will be completely impartial because she got her free copy today. Wen and I have lunch together every Wednesday and the drawing will give us something to do while gnawing on sweet-and-sour spare ribs at the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.

The winners will be announced on this blog, and perhaps on Facebook, since I’m always scrounging around for content that is more interesting than, “6PM and still sober. Yay me!”  I will contact the winners for snail mail addresses. If they reply promptly, and the postal gods smile upon them, they may receive their loot before July 3^rd, which is when the book appears on bookstore shelves.

If you’d like to enter the contest:

a)   Leave your email address in the comments

OR

b)   Send an email to author@brendalbaker.com

OR

c)    Send a message, or post a comment on my Facebook page.

For a guaranteed win:

a)   deposit a whack of cash in a numbered Swiss bank account and send me the password

OR

b)   get George Clooney to do any of the above.  

*The Inevitable Disclaimers

I wasn’t kidding when I said the marketing budget is miniscule, which is why I can only ship to Canada or the USA and why only five books are on offer.

I swear, cross my heart and hope to die, that I will use any contact information provided for the sole purpose of contacting the winners. Your email and snail-mail addresses are safe with me. (Unless, of course, you are George Clooney, in which case I will be making a personal delivery.) However, I feel compelled to point out that this is a public blog and who knows what kind of depraved spammers are out there trolling for the email addresses of unwary commenters.

Beta-readers and critiquers are not eligible since they don’t need two copies of the book. Actually, they don’t even need one. They know how it ends as well.

What Would Netiquette Nelly Say?

A few mornings ago, I found an e. e. cummings style message on my professional Facebook page. Below is the complete and unabridged text of this message. Only the email and IM addresses have been redacted.

“It's has been a great deal for me to see such a cutie like you here on this site i liked your profile very much..you sounded sweet and it was nice reading it.when i joined this place i never expected to meet a woman of your type, because you so adorable and cute.i really would love to meet u in person. i really don't mean to force u into things dear but i will be happy if i meet such a wonderful woman like you are . i don't like to play head games....i'm a kind hearted man who wants to please everyone ..make you laugh till it hurts..lol.i would want us to get going so if u are such a person then lets chat cutei.i'm one of the nice man and want to meet a lady like you would like and want to meet... and hope is the same with you...well... who knows if it's the will of God that we could succed or something better can come out of this letter that i am sending you then Baby..i will be the happiest man in this world....if not then the saddest man . i hope u will take your time and think about it and let as get to know each other some more. i would love YOU to tell me more about you.. and would like us to trade yahoo id's so we can chat via messenger ID or better still you also can ask and i surely will let you have mine. Till then take care and bye [redacted]   or [redacted]    im [redacted] i will be removing my profile very soon be cos i don't get anyone since i have been here.....thanks and hope to hear from u soon..”

The man who sent this message, let’s call him Freddie to protect the potentially innocent, has placed me in an awkward social networking position.

There is no rule that says con artists must be Rhodes scholars, so despite the lack of Nigerian dictators or Spanish prisoners, I thought it reasonable to assume Freddie’s intentions were fraudulent. To me it seemed obvious that the clumsy, artless prose and the sprinkling of unwelcome (and occasionally misspelled) endearments from a complete stranger were intended to winnow out all but the truly stupid and/or desperate respondent. I particularly enjoyed Freddie’s assertion he did not like head games and his naïvely mistaken conviction that I’m a wonderful woman.  I also thought his disappointment at not getting anyone nice with his profile added an amusing touch of bathos to his plea.

Being extremely hard-hearted and neither desperate nor stupid, I decided to delete the message. But before doing so, I checked out the disappointing Facebook profile, which Freddie foolishly left set to public, hoping for more grammar giggles at his expense. Instead I found confusion, because Freddie only has one friend, and her name is the same as mine.

So you see my netiquette dilemma here.

Did Freddie really intend to message his Facebook friend Brenda and somehow messaged me instead? I checked out her profile. Admittedly she and I are both overweight and we both wear glasses, but other than those two points of similarity, I didn’t see much resemblance between us. Of course Freddie could be extremely near-sighted, or even blind and working with text-to-speech software. To test this theory, I logged into Facebook with a fake email address created specifically for the purpose and performed a search for Brenda Baker. The results were inconclusive. My professional page came up sixth on the list of possible Brenda Bakers, but my picture was the first one showing a chubby female wearing glasses. As for Freddie’s friend Brenda, after scanning about thirty screens of Brenda Bakers, I gave up looking for her.

Another puzzle was the striking difference between the grammar in Freddie’s message and the grammar in his profile on Facebook.

“I am distinguished looking, blue eyes, black hair, 5'10" or 178cms and my weight is 185lbs or 84kg.. I am intelligent, passionate, and optimistic about life in general. I have a good education and a good job. I have a wonderful passion for writing. I'm kinda good in poetry, and am very ambitious. My friends will tell you that I am honest, have a sense of humor and care deeply for family. I believe in fate, real love and God Almighty because I was born and raised to love God and share this love with others in divers ways, in any case I respect other people's world view. I am not into smoking or drugs, but will drink a little on rare occasions. In my leisure time I enjoy movies, music, festivals, concerts, the beach, visiting parks, working out, barbecues, boating, and any experience that creates great memories.”

Did he have a stroke and lose the ability to punctuate between setting up his profile and writing the message? If he really understood proper punctuation, why would he send such a sloppy message—especially from one writer to another? Of course, if he thought I was his friend Brenda, he wouldn’t know he was writing to a writer, but even so, the motive for this grammatical disparity remained unfathomable. I could give no credit to his assertion that he has a good job, since he listed his profession as self-employed; his profile picture showed his hair to be grey, assuming it really was his picture; and finally, the only item Freddie had listed under “Interests” was “women”.

So what should I do?

Should I write to Freddie and tell him he contacted the wrong Brenda? I don’t want to do this because, while it’s possible Freddie is a simple-minded social media noob who has mistaken Facebook for PlentyOfFish, it seems much more likely he really is a con artist trolling for marks, in which case he couldn’t possibly have contacted the wrong Brenda because there is no right Brenda. Any Brenda will do and I have no intention of encouraging Freddie to believe I’m the any Brenda of his dreams.

Should I write to the other Brenda and tell her my theory of mistaken identity? The con artist caveat would still be in effect, with the added difficulty that she is unlikely to be pleased with Freddie when she learns he can’t tell the difference between her and someone at least twenty years older with one tenth the amount of hair.

Should I just ignore the message? But what if Freddie and Brenda really are destined for one another? I can’t be responsible for destroying their future happiness. I can barely take responsibility for destroying my own.

What the internet really needs is an e-version of Emily Post , an e-xpert to guide us through these awkward social media situations. Netiquette Nelly, where are you? I need you desperately.