• Mood: accomplished
• Music: black tape for a blue girl: halo star

more from the book expo

I milled around the F+W exhibit yesterday looking at some of the other nifty books they put out like "Bible Road" by Sam Fentress which is a really amazing collection of photographs of signs about god (not like people walking on water, but road signs, hand painted signs, church signs, stuff like that) all across the highways and byways of America. The hand-made ones especially I found captivating. And also the Domiknitrix book Whip your knitting into shape by Jennifer Stanfield -- the goth knitting book with a black cover. I was psyched ot see that Scott Francis, the author of the "Monster Spotters Guide" was there, with a huge stack of bumper stickers that says "I BRAKE FOR SASQUATCH" (yes i got some).

When it became apparant that I was more in the way than out of the way, I took my copy of Armed America and trundled off to B&H Camera. Those of you who are photographers will recognize B&H as the photo-mail-order Mecca -- so I was excited to see it in person. It's HUGE. Photo equipment as far as they eye can see. Like a giant candy store.

I got this crazy idea in my head that I should buy a Nikon D1 -- Nikon's first DSLR, it would be hip vintage cool! And they're only like $250 now because they have miserable resolution. So anyway, I trundled up to the used section, they didn't have any D1's, but one of the employees pointed to my badge and said "Are you an author?" And sure enough, my badge says "Author". I pulled out my book and all the camera nerds clustered around and we talked about how to light a living room and stuff like that -- it was a marvelous geek moment. And when someone asked what I was working on now I said "Military tattoos" -- and one of the guys behind the counter, a swell young fellow named Chris said "I got my I Ching tattooed on my arm to mark every important date in my career in the Air Force."

Hows that?



Chris and I went to the village and had dinner at a Ukranian restaurant and talked about writing book proposals and I wandered around New York.



Eventually I met up with my friend Bernard who works for the New York Times. We hung out at the bar at the Affina. I got to bed later than I should have. Big, fun day today.