When I sent out the newsletter this\u00a0week, I didn\u2019t mean to set off a firestorm, but I did.\u00a0 A whole bunch of my non-e-book readers wound up and let me have it with both barrels, taking issue with my referring to them as Dead Tree Readers or DTRs. One woman was so put out that she was threatening to stop reading my books altogether which was certainly not my intention in writing the newsletter.<\/p>\n
First and foremost let me say, that when I use that terminology I am in no way being disrespectful.\u00a0 I appreciate ALL my readers\u2014print and non-print. I suppose I could refer to the paper only readers as PORs or as NEBRs (Non E-book Readers) but neither of those really grab me.\u00a0 Instead, I thought I\u2019d use this space this space to explain the origin of that tongue-in-cheek phrase.<\/p>\n
When you\u2019re an author doing a book signing, you become a target, plain and simple.\u00a0 Most of the people coming to have books signed are ordinary, nice people, but that doesn\u2019t mean there aren\u2019t a few Lulus thrown into the mix now and then.<\/p>\n
One of the scariest of those was the guy who came dashing up to me at the grand re-opening of the Smokey Point Safeway.\u00a0 My book rep had put brochures advertising the event on the windshields of cars in the parking lot.\u00a0 He rushed up to the table waving one of those and said, \u201cAre you the woman who writes murder mysteries?\u201d When I told him yes, he continued, \u201cI\u2019ve just been acquitted of murdering seven people.\u00a0 Do you want to write my book?\u201d\u00a0 Well \u2026 actually \u2026 as a matter of fact \u2026 NO, I did not.\u00a0 What I told him instead was, \u201cI don\u2019t do true crime.\u00a0 You need to talk to Ann Rule.\u201d\u00a0 Ann was not amused.\u00a0 She told me later that she knew he got out on a technicality, and she wanted nothing to do with him, either.<\/p>\n
And then there was the woman in the back of the room at the library in Pinetop, Arizona, in 2001.\u00a0 Throughout my presentation, she stood there with her arms crossed, not smiling, not nodding, not laughing at any of the jokes.\u00a0 When it came time for me to sign books, she made sure she was at the back of the line.\u00a0 That\u2019s where the difficult cases usually turn up\u2014at the end of the line.\u00a0 When she stepped in front of me she asked, \u201cWas your husband a witness in a series of homicides that took place in Tucson in the late sixties and early seventies?\u201d\u00a0 Of course that was true, and here\u2019s how I answered, \u201cYes, he was.\u201d<\/p>\n
While we were on the reservation, on Friday, May 22, 1970, I had to stay after school to decorate for the prom. On the same day my husband and I were expecting out of town company at our home thirty miles away.\u00a0 At lunch we discussed the situation and my husband decided that he would leave the car for me to use and would hitchhike home after school to await the arrival of our out-of-town visitors.\u00a0 He went out to the highway, stuck out his thumb and was given a ride home by a guy, who half an hour earlier and ten miles farther down the road had forced a woman off the highway at gunpoint, shot her, raped her in front of her two small children, and left her to die. When details of the homicide emerged, my husband realized that the killer was most likely the guy who had given him a ride home.<\/p>\n
The details my first husband was able to provide to the investigator, Pima County Homicide Detective, Jack Lyons, helped identify the man who murdered people at twenty minutes after two on the twenty-second day of the month by shooting them off moving vehicles\u2014a sixteen year-old girl off a bicycle, a forty-something year-old man off a bulldozer, and the twenty-eight year-old woman on the reservation who was his third and final victim.<\/p>\n
Back to the book signing, more than thirty years later, and to that very unhappy young woman standing in front of me.\u00a0 As soon as I acknowledged that my husband was indeed a\u00a0witness, she launched off into her story, speaking as though we\u2019d been having this conversation for more than thirty years.\u00a0 \u201cMy father was the man on the bulldozer,\u201d she said with no additional introduction.\u00a0 \u201cMy mother would never talk to me about it.\u00a0 What can you tell me?\u201d<\/p>\n
Whoa! Her father\u2019s homicide was and, I\u2019m sure, still is the central issue in her life, and yet the only person she could discuss it with was a total stranger.<\/p>\n
So yes, for good or ill, authors at book signings are targets.\u00a0 But I digress.\u00a0 It\u2019s my blog, and I have full authorization to digress to my heart\u2019s content.\u00a0 And back to the DTR issue.\u00a0 (I\u2019m also authorized to begin sentences with conjunctions if I feel the urge.)<\/p>\n
Very early on, as a beginning author with a single book in print\u2014a slender paperback called Until Proven Guilty\u2014I did a signing at a bookstore in Eugene, Oregon.\u00a0 I was sitting there at the table, minding my own business, when a very scary looking young guy came sauntering over.\u00a0 \u201cHow many trees had to die in order for you to publish this book?\u201d he demanded with a sneer.\u00a0 \u201cHow many?”<\/p>\n
I was very new at doing book signings at the time.\u00a0 I have no recollection of how I replied, but his words have stuck with me ever since.\u00a0 It turns out, I\u2019ve been a Dead Tree Writer, a DTW, for thirty plus years.\u00a0 If you find my use of the term DTR offensive, I\u2019m very sorry.\u00a0 It is a reflection of my own writing history rather than a reflection on you.<\/p>\n
By the way, when I use that term, I\u2019m not implying that my paper-only readers are any less important to me or that they\u2019re somehow over the hill.\u00a0 In actual fact, it\u2019s most likely just the opposite.<\/p>\n
My own gradual migration from paper to e-books happened because of my eyes\u2014because, as a woman of a certain age, having the ability to make the fonts larger really helps me.\u00a0 And then there\u2019s also a question of convenience.\u00a0 The ability to travel\u00a0with seventeen or so books packed away in my iPad really works for me.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the deal.\u00a0 If you want me to ditch the phraseology DTR, then you\u2019ll need to come up with something better.<\/p>\n
And next time you see the term DTR in print, just consider the source\u2014it\u2019s not you; it\u2019s me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I sent out the newsletter this\u00a0week, I didn\u2019t mean to set off a firestorm, but I did.\u00a0 A whole bunch of my non-e-book readers wound up and let me have it with both barrels, taking issue with my referring to them as Dead Tree Readers or DTRs. One woman was so put out that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33,6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-tour-2","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-ha","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1064"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1074,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions\/1074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}