There's a book I wrote and had published in limited (5 copies) release -- since I had a coupon code for free printing and I love deals. The secret romantic in me has a lot of love for the found object and it perhaps being a sort of serendipitous event. To that end I'd decided I should drop off a copy of said book somewhere in Europe while there with the wife-to-be. There was a most excellent venue presented to me in Prague, but alas I wasn't carrying it. Or I may, in fact, have just been too nervous about it. Probably overzealous to drop it in the Kafka section. With a touch of sadness, I czeched out.
Nearing the end of our journey another great and eclectic book shop within the Museumsquartier that might be this place presented itself. Again I don't recall whether I was bookless or ball-less in the circumstance, but once again opportunity passed. After all, it's a little embarrassing to stick your own book into a place like that.
So at last I gave into halfway guerrilla marketing, purchasing the latest Junot Diaz book at an exorbitant rate in a Vienna airport book shop, and replacing it with my own offering. Inside was just an inscription hopeful that someone would pick it up, read it and, most importantly and least likely, enjoy it. Who's to say how much of this will or has taken place as one thing I didn't do was include any sort of contact information, save even a link to this blog or perhaps a twitter account.
At any rate, between the swapping of [book] places with another writer from New Jersey, and that the book is about an itinerant and then left in an airport, it all seems to have come in not too far shy of 360 degrees. Sometimes you don't get to find out where or how a thing ends up. And since fiction is about inventing outcomes (or lying and calling them invented -- one might use the terms "repackaging" or "repurposing"), an invented future for this work fits just fine.
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