KYLE’S B&B: Latest News & Random Thoughts

And here I thought I was done with book-signings for this first volume of Kyle’s B&B. Yet this turned out to be one of the funnest and wildest appearances so far! As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Book Expo is the big annual event in the book publishing industry, where all the publishers and many authors converge in one location for a giant enormous weekend long festival of all things literary. Being that it was being held in NYC this year, my editor at Kensington arranged for me to do a book-signing appearance at the Kensington booth on Saturday afternoon at 2:00 pm. I arrived with some trepidation….after all, virtually all of the book-sigings I have done so far have been in gay venues, and also, this would be a crowd where they weren’t necessarily coming to see me. There were lots of big time authors scheduled to be here, (this is the same event where, a year or 2 ago, Bill O’Reilly and Al Franken got into a shouting match while making appearances). So, I wondered if anyone would be interested in getting a signed copy of Kyle’s Bed & Breakfast, with everything else going on there that day. Well, they were interested! A surprisingly huge amount of people came up to get a book signed, and this was really fun meeting people who’d traveled there from all over the country, many of whom read Kyle’s B&B in their local gay papers. I also signed copies for gay authors Greg Herren, (who was about to do a booksigning, too), and Jay Quinn, author of Metes & Bounds, a book I absolutely love! He was so friendly and sweet, and what a delight to find out he’s a fan of the comic strip! I can’t wait to read his new book that’s coming out this month, Back Where He Started. So, yeah….I’m glad I went. And I have to send a big THANK YOU out to John and all the folks at my publisher Kensington Books, who made this all go so smoothly and wonderfully. This day ROCKED!!!

OK, so let’s get it out right up front: I didn’t win the “Lammie” award in my category at the Lambda Literary Awards on Thursday night. No, I wasn’t crushed or devastated, (sure, I was a little disappointed, though!). David Sedaris won, and you know…just to be competing in the same category with David Sedaris, (and Augusten Burroughs, too), is an awesome honor for me, so, that was really quite a consolation. The whole awards ceremony was interesting and well done; Lea Delaria hosted, raucously and no-holds-barred and quite funny. I also got to see a plethora of well-known gay authors and figures in the gay media, and truly historic people like Martin Duberman. My category came up early, too, so I didn’t have to sit there all evening on the edge of my seat waiting for the announcement; after it was announced, I was able to breathe and sit back and relax & enjoy the rest of the show. I was fortunate to have K.M. Soehnlein, the author of the excellent The World of Normal Boys, sitting next to me for the ceremony, (we have the same editor at Kensington Books), and being able to chat with him between awards kinda’ took the edge off the whole thing. Towards the end of the evening, it occurred to me how I used to look up to so many of the authors there at the awards ceremony, (I still do, actually), and how I used to dream about somehow getting my own work into their arena some day. And now, here I was, my own book nominated for an award at this ceremony, the epitome of gay literary recognition. So, really…this was a great, great evening!