111. Identity Crisis

As soon as I walked into the bookstore to find ten rows filled with fans waiting to hear me read, my heart nearly stopped. Almost all of them had red hair! They were after me! I considered turning and running, but then I remembered my very own gimmick. Red hair is my protagonist’s trademark. They were dying their hair for me.

It is a little difficult doing an event in another language. You have to funnel yourself in and out of the translator’s mercy. This event in Florence was set up differently than most I’d been to. There were not books at my table, and the announcer wanted me to start with question and answer and move onto a reading at the end, which would inspire them to buy the book.

When people started asking questions, I found that I had difficulty answering them. I figured the translator wasn’t that good because often audience members referred to moments in my books that never happened or they called the characters by the wrong names. Some of them referenced my writing background, which was flawed in many ways, but so many people mentioned my six-year residency at Atlanta College, that I started to believe I actually had attended there. They all seemed to know me better than I did, and my mind hadn’t exactly been sound today what with all the stress of bugs and aliens. Perhaps I was this Atlanta man.

And then I saw the poster on the window and my shoulders slumped. I hadn’t bothered reading it because it was all in Italian, but I could make out the date and time now advertising this event. The only problem was, it wasn’t my name on the heading, and it wasn’t my book cover on the poster.

In the end, I ended up selling and signing more books than at any other event. Unfortunately, they were all robot thrillers by Marco Thom.