Self-Deluded Attempts at Shameless Self-Promotion
The friend and officemate where I held my 21-year-long day job once told me I was the worst salesperson he had ever encountered. Ah, but that was before my all-new, enthralling, full-time phase as a writer. Right?
He was listening as I cajoled someone over the phone. “If you want to do this—maybe you don’t—but maybe if you do . . .”
Drat. Am I overdoing it on adjectives? Or adverbs? I tend to go heavy on the word maybe. As you may have noticed. Most of you here, after all, are writers, so you would know. I know, because I’ve been reading you.
With your collective wisdom in mind, I’d like to share my latest attempts at self-promotion for your advice/commiseration/other action. I have been thrilled (yes, thrilled) to launch my first substantial writing project, a blog called “Third Place Cafe Stories,” which I market as a place for tiny true stories that happen in cafes. Some are flash, others micro-memoir.
As you may have guessed, I spend a lot of time in cafes. I love them. They have saved me in many a dark hour. I have met the most incredible characters and the kindest human beings—ever!—within their walls.
Like Sotirios, a young Greek-Italian American I encountered at the Artopolis Bakery Cafe and Agora on Halsted in Chicago two years ago. He had just accepted a job as the cafe’s artistic director. Wearing his exuberance on his sleeve, he expounded his ideas, from Greek music nights to Romanesque statuary to a more modern cafe vibe.
Alas, it all came to naught. I met up with him in another Chicago cafe earlier this month, where we lamented the (maybe) permanent closing of Artopolis and the unexpected way his job dissolved amid the old ways of the new owners, a subject beyond our scope here.
But Sotirios had a great idea for the blog. Print calling cards with QR codes on them and distribute them to the cafes. Fantastic! I loved it! I loved it so much I did it.
I asked the guy who helped me print the cards at the Staples on Wabash the following deeply thought-out question: “What do you think?”
“They’re beautiful!” he said.
Ha ha!, you are thinking. He was the one who printed them.
“What does your boss think?”
“He loves them!”
Ha ha!, you are thinking. He was the boss of the guy who printed them.
I asked the kids handling the register (oops, I mean PC screen) at a cafe what they thought.
“Cool!” they said as they pulled out their cell phones and scanned the QR code.
“I’ll leave them at the window with the postcards,” said Caroline at the Unabridged Bookstore on Broadway, where I had just purchased a stack of books. They took a small pile of cards.
Newly armed with confidence, I visited another bookstore, which shall remain nameless, but which happens to reside on Chicago’s South Michigan Avenue.
Dozens of books were scattered on tables outside the door, the aftermath of a small hurricane, under signs that read, “Do not touch! We have not yet sorted these books.” Or something to that effect.
But inside, rows of spines on tall shelves and tables with cool books in bright jackets. A couple conversed over the register (oops again, I do mean PC screen).
I congratulated them. I hadn’t been to this particular store before. How could this be?
“It’s been here thirty years,” the man informed me. But they had only recently taken it over.
“Wonderful! BTW, I write these little stories about cafes, which I publish on this blog—these, I dunno, little things that happen . . . ”
I fished out a bunch of cards from my coat pocket. “How many?”
“I’ll take one,” the man said, as the woman bunched her face into a wad of disdain and remarked, “I don’t want one.”
I briefly wondered if the cards contained a heretofore undetected off-putting odor.
I browsed to save face. I glanced through a copy of The Hours by Michael Cunningham. I luxuriated in the reliefs of the flowers on the cover with the tips of my fingers. I discovered that one must read the part that is a reprint of Mrs. Dalloway right-side up, and the rest the other way around.
The woman at the register (Fooey! I do mean PC screen) watched from the corner of her eye. She saw an Ophelia only pretending to read, waiting for Hamlet to walk past. Maybe.
I smiled at them as I left. The exclamation “John Cusack was there!” nestled in laughter at the moment I walked out still rings in my ears.
I do remain the proud owner of one and 1/4 small boxes of calling cards with QR codes on them from Staples.
Look here for the blog: