Last week I attended a powerful and very crowded reading by Wally Lamb at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Wally Lamb publisher folks, please know that the kind staff at Bookshop asked me to stop taking photos right after I got this one. They truly wanted to comply with your no-photos-before-book-signing-time rule.

After the reading, my friend Peter and I wandered down the street looking into festively decorated shop windows and walls and rooftops.

Like this bicycle store window, I want to wish everyone a very Merry this & that. And have a Happy the other while you’re at it.

When I first moved to Santa Cruz in 2004, I was lonely and depressed. Not even a year had gone by since my brother had died unexpectedly, and here I was in a new place, still grieving, and trying to find a job. Those were hard times, but I found solace in a local independent bookstore called Bookshop Santa Cruz.

There I sat for hours on end, reading books about grief and books about spirituality and books of intense and very clever modern fiction. But during times when I was too upset about my lot in life to concentrate on any of that stuff, I turned to the mystery novels of Laurie R. King. They never failed to pull me through the bleakest moments. Reading her books isn’t the same as distracting oneself with trashy fiction. She touches on many subjects that hold sometimes painful meanings for me; her characters deal with grief, with inner conflicts of faith, with all kinds of difficult situations that feel familiar. Yet somehow the overall feeling is not one of heaviness. The plot carries you forward as you read, or maybe it’s the academic slant, or just Laurie King’s smooth descriptive ability. I’m still not sure exactly why this all adds up to comfort. But I know there are people all over the world who feel the same way about this author’s work.

Never did I imagine, as I read alone in the bookstore, that I would someday be at Laurie King’s house, taking portraits of this author for her new book jacket. But that’s exactly what the Red Bats were doing on October 17, 2008. I’d taken her picture before, but this was the first time she sat for a portrait session with us.

Patrick’s camera decided to break during the first fifteen minutes of the shoot, which almost sent me into a panic attack. It felt weird to hear silence instead of the rapid firing of his shutter somewhere nearby during a Red Bat shoot. My own clicking sounded loud and awkward. But despite the breakage and the near-panic, we both ended up with great shots. And now Laurie King is in the process of choosing her jacket photo.

As you’ll see in the photos below, Laurie is a wonderful subject for portraits. And her best friend in the world seems to be a certain very special cat.

Thank you, Laurie. We think you’re the tops.