In the bookstore today, a customer was looking at my big spinner rack of Who Pooped in the Park? books. He looked at the sign on the top, which shows a picture of me signing books in Yellowstone Park. Then he looked at me. Then back at the sign. Then at me. Then he raised an eyebrow.
“Yes,” I said, “that’s me. And, by the way, my 18th Who Pooped? book is coming out next month! It’s for the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, Washington, and California.”
He swiftly summoned his daughter. I’m very bad at judging ages, but I’m going to take a shot in the dark and say she was eight or nine years old.
“This man here is the author of the Who Pooped in the Park? book that you like,” he told her.
She eyed me suspiciously.
“The author?”
“That’s right,” her dad assured her. “He wrote these books.”
She looked at me more closely.
“He’s alive.”
“No, honey, not all authors are dead. Some are still alive.”
Oh, well. I’m still planning a book signing at the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association conference in Portland, Oregon this fall. If I live that long.
Gary D. Robson 
I’d take it as a compliment: in this young fan’s mind, all the classics were penned by people long dead, so the author of a book as good as Who Pooped must also be sprouting daisies. 🙂
Cute story. Do you think she was disappointed? You’re famous now, Gary Just imagine how known and loved you’ll be when your dead! (Reminds me of Mark Twain’s “Is He Dead?” a play I recently saw in Bozeman.)
Oh, not disappointed, Janet, just confused. I guess she thinks of authors being all those folks who wrote the classics a long, long time ago, not young vibrant alive people like you and me!