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Caution: Haiku May Lead to Drinking Beer With Friends

This is the author picture that used to run with my “Beer Snob” columns. That’s a Scottish Ale I’m tasting.
Oh, my goodness gracious! Yesterday, I posted 26 of my beer haiku on this blog. As usual, I posted a link on Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook link said:
Haiku: Celebrating Beer in Verse, in which I offer up 26 original poems to beer. Anyone care to add their own?
The response was marvelous, as a couple of my friends jumped in to respond, and we all ended up at Sam’s Taproom (the pub/tasting room attached to our local brewery, Red Lodge Ales).
Be careful, people! Writing beer haiku can lead to laughing, drinking, witty repartee, and hugs.
I’ve edited this only slightly to remove last names, fix the order of things, and take out a few extraneous comments. Other than that, this is what appeared on my Facebook timeline immediately after last night’s blog post:
Doug:
I really like beer
No, seriously, I do.
Gary:
Doug writes a haiku
But he stops after two lines
Doug:
BAH! In the comments section, you have to hit all kinds of Shift+Enter mumbo jumbo to make it format correctly!
Doug:
Beer, mead, beer, mead, beer
One is sweet, one is bitter
I like both just fine.
Doug:
Hoppy beer is fine
Malty beer is more my style
Scottish Ale, Porter
Doug:
Beer is good alone
Beer is better with great friends
Beer is always good
Doug:
Beer beer beer beer beer
Beer beer beer beer beer beer beer
I love this here beer
Dan:
Care for a pint sir? Indubitably, I would So, Ale or Lager?
Doug:
Dan has the same formatting problems I have.
Dan:
Stupid Facebooking
Writing a poem about beer
Can’t find the shift key
Doug:
Laughing at my pals
Dan, want to go get a beer?
Come pick my ass up.
Gary:
My Thanksgiving beer
Is all Montana-made beer
I love living here
Doug:
Gary, you in town?
Dan wants to go get a beer
Sam’s Taproom sounds good.
Gary:
Sam’s Taproom sounds great
I’d love to join you bozos
But I have some work
Dan:
Went to the TR
Eating some yummy chicken
pick you up real soon
Doug:
I think from now on
I will comment in Haiku
On everyone’s wall
Dan:
Excuse sacrilege
But oh my freaking christmas
Haiku can be fun
Gary:
It is easier
to make comments in Haiku
than to write Limericks
Gary:
Oh, who needs to work?
I will join you for a pint
Shall I pick you up?
Doug:
The first to arrive
With him shall I ride to Sam’s
and hoist a beer, CHEERS!
Gary:
I’m on my way now
If Dan gets there before me
Call and let me know.
Simon:
To craft an odd sort of verse,
One couldn’t think anything worse
Than fives, fives, and sevens,
about beer (good heavens!),
To me, seems downright perverse.
Adam:
I don’t understand.
What the hell is a haiku?
You people are nuts.
Jim:
God is good. Beer is great.
He gave us beer forsooth partake.
With his sun on hops doth shine.
Please back off, THIS beer is mine!
Jim:
I know…it’s a rhyme, not haiku. Gesundheit!
A few book signing observations from Yellowstone
Last week I made my annual pilgrimage to Yellowstone Park to sign Who Pooped in the Park? books. There are two concessionaires in the Park: Delaware North, which operates the gift shops, and Xanterra, which operates the hotels. Some years I go to the Xanterra sites and some years I go to the Delaware North sites. Some years I hit both. This year, I was invited well in advance by Xanterra and offered one of the choice sites in the Park: the lobby at the Old Faithful Inn. Since it’s a busy time of year, I decided instead of my usual routine (a few hours a day for a week in various locations around Yellowstone), I’d just do two long days in the same place.
Signings at places like this are very different from bookstore events. For one thing, no bookstore is going to ask you to spend eight hours behind a signing table. For another, the foot traffic is simply amazing. For a second-tier author like me, selling 30 books at a signing is pretty good. I did that in the first hour in the Old Faithful Inn. Also, the questions you answer are quite different (I’ve talked about this here before).
This year’s top questions
- When is the next eruption of Old Faithful? See that thing on the wall behind me in the picture above? It’s a clock showing the estimated time of the next eruption of Old Faithful. This question was #2 last year and jumped to the top this year for some reason.
- Where’s the bathroom? Usually question #1. Maybe folks weren’t drinking as much water this year.
- I took a picture of some scat. Can you identify it? Maybe. Unless it’s a blurry picture with no context and nothing to give it a sense of scale. But what the heck? I’ll give it a try!
- Is that POOP? See below.
- Where are the animals hanging out? I try to answer this one. Really I do. But Yellowstone is over 2.2 million acres of wilderness and I just got here yesterday. This is what the interpretive staff is for.
- Are these free? Really, people? You think I drove down here to give away free copies of my books?
Yep, that’s poop
Props are a highly effective way to start a conversation, and starting conversations sells books. Lest that sound entirely mercenary, I’m a social animal and I do love having conversations. But back to the main point…

Having a six-story lobby with balconies all around gives people a unique perspective on book signings.
In this picture, you can see a row of round things on the table in front of me. You can also see rows of books. Sometimes I do rows, sometimes big spiral stacks, sometimes pyramids. The round things on the table are samples of animal scat (a.k.a. “poop”) that I have cast in resin. The big one in the middle is bear scat — always a crowd pleaser. That thing in the lower left is not poop. It’s my lunch.
As a complete non-sequitor, I inscribed books to hundreds of people this week. The vast majority were children. The most common names were Emma and Wyatt. Do what you will with that information.
Something new and different
I have done a lot of book signings in my time, but every year brings something new. This year it was an evacuation.
It was about 6:15 p.m., and I had been sitting at that table since 11:00 (minus a few bathroom breaks). I was chatting with a family when an alarm sounded. I made some quip about someone opening a door they shouldn’t have opened, and then a recorded voice came on asking everyone to evacuate the hotel. The restaurant was full, with a line halfway through the lobby. The bar was full. The gift shop was packed. There were lines at registration. People were unpacking their bags in their rooms. Everyone began streaming out.
I had my handy-dandy leather satchel with me, so I swiftly stuffed my important possessions in it (signing pen, poop samples, phone) and headed outside. The books and the sign were left to fend for themselves.
Cell service at the Old Faithful Inn is spotty. Did I say “spotty”? I really meant “lousy.” In the interests of keeping Yellowstone as pristine as possible, there is one cell tower in the area, and it is utterly incapable of handling the data traffic that people attempt to use it for. When I went outside, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of people all trying — with varying degrees of success — to tweet about the experience. I managed to get a tweet to go through myself, shot a text message to my wife so she could find me, and then settled in to chat with people.
“We had just gotten our dinner,” one woman lamented. “I had only had one bite of my steak!”
“There’s the difference between men and women,” I told her. “I would have brought the steak with me.”
In general, people handled the situation with grace and humor. Someone commented that a vendor with a beer cart would be making a mint. Someone else said if there was a fire in the kitchen, at least the food wouldn’t get cold.
The signing was scheduled to end at 7:00, and that’s about what time we were allowed back in. It wasn’t until the next morning that I found out what had actually happened: low water pressure in the fire sprinkler system had triggered the alarm.
Guerrilla marketing
I believe in using whatever tools lay themselves at my feet when it comes to marketing. When we checked in and went to our room, we found that there was no WiFi available in the hotel except for “Dave’s iPhone.” I don’t know who Dave is, but he had a password on his WiFi, so it didn’t do us any good.
Luckily, however, I have my iPhone set up to become a mobile WiFi hotspot, too. Using it for that does suck the juice out of the battery, so I don’t use it that often, but this situation gave me an idea. There was only one visible WiFi network in the hotel, and it would probably be going away soon. So I changed the name of my iPhone and activated the mobile hotspot app when my signing began the next morning. What did people see when they searched for a WiFi hotspot that day?
That, my dear readers, is called free advertising.
I’m a celebrity, by golly!
Every writer should have the experience of being recognized. It’s an amazing feeling. When I was having breakfast with my wife the following morning, someone came up with a book she’d purchased in the gift shop right before the evacuation and hadn’t gotten signed. She recognized me, of course, by my ruggedly handsome face and thoughtful, intelligent demeanor. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the Who Pooped in the Park t-shirt I was wearing.
Yep, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Customizing presentations at book signings
Seven years ago, when my first Who Pooped in the Park? book was hot off the presses, I cut one up, scanned it, and turned it into a PowerPoint presentation. I have used that slide show many times, and I learn something new every time I give a talk. That, actually, is one of the things I like most about public speaking: if I do it right, I learn as much as my audience does.
Among the things I have learned are:
- Carry props. It keeps the talk more interesting if you can show people something tangible, not just pictures.
- Move. Don’t just park yourself safely behind a lectern. This may be controversial advice, because a lot of speaking coaches will tell you not to wander all over the stage when giving a talk, but my primary audience is children and they bore easily. I move around, point at the slides, hold up props, walk over to audience members and hand them things to pass around. I’ve even been known to demonstrate different gaits.
- Engage the audience. Ask them questions. I like to ask where people are from at the beginning and make references to their home states or countries later during the talk. Address people directly.
- If you expect to sell books after the talk, mention the book. Say something about how and why you wrote it. Put a picture of the cover on one (or more) of your slides. And mention that you’ll be selling and signing books after the talk.
- Make sure you have contact information on one of your slides in addition to having bookmarks or business cards available. That makes it easier for people to send you pictures they took, or invitations to other events. Instead of an email address, consider using your website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and other social media contact methods. You’ll get less spam that way, and you may pick up followers on those sites.

NOTE: That website isn’t accurate anymore. I’m on GaryDRobson.com!
And, to bring this back to the main subject for the day, customize your slide show. I just gave a talk at the National Bighorn Sheep Center in Dubois, Wyoming a few days ago, and we did a book signing afterward. Here’s what I did to customize the PowerPoint presentation:
First, the opening slide. The top half of the slide has the book banner on it. I went to the Sheep Center’s website and grabbed a picture with their logo, added that to the bottom of the slide, and overlaid the date. I set up the projector in advance and left that slide up on the screen as an introduction until the talk started. That way, attendees wouldn’t just think, “oh, this is some generic presentation,” they’d know it was in some way connected to here.
Next, since the Center is all about bighorns, I figured I should insert a picture of a bighorn sheep. When I am doing slide shows, my first preference is always to use a picture I took myself. If I don’t have an appropriate shot, my next stop is either a stock photo house or Wikipedia, so I know I am using the picture legally.
I have an account with a stock photo company from when I published a newspaper. Generally, I am not going to pay $10 or $20 for a picture I am using one time in a slide show, unless it’s absolutely perfect. This stock photo shop, however (Dreamstime) has a free photo section which sometimes has what I need.
Wikipedia (or, more accurately, Wikimedia Commons) has a wealth of photographs that you can use in slide shows without royalties — just check the license.
Since I didn’t have a good bighorn sheep picture of my own, and there weren’t any cheap (or free) at the stock photo house, I picked one up from Wikipedia, overlaid some scat and track photos, and it made a perfect slide.
The local bookstore in Dubois set up and promoted the talk, so I added a “thank you” slide at the end. It’s typically easy to get logos from a store’s website or Facebook page. After they put a bunch of time and effort promoting the talk, it means a lot when you go to the effort of making a slide to thank them.
I am not a “read from my notes” kind of guy. I think it sounds awkward and stilted, and when you are reading from notes you aren’t looking at your audience. If I know my subject matter — and I had better! — then all I need is an outline, to make sure I don’t forget anything important.
That makes it easy to tailor the talk to the audience, since I am speaking extemporaneously anyway. Spending an hour or so customizing the slides makes it look like you have really put forth an effort, and that’s the kind of little thing that gets you invited back.