The Invitation

​I never answer phone calls from numbers I don’t know, especially when the call is long distance.  Most of the time, a long distance call is the American Red Cross begging for bodily fluid.  It’s always an emergency with the Red Cross.  I do like to donate blood, when and where I want to and I don’t need to be asked several times a week.
The second rule I have is that I wait to learn if the caller from an unknown message leaves a voicemail message.  Most robo calls don’t or can’t leave a voice mail.  The American Red Cross has conquered that mountain too, the damn machine leaves a message – so I don’t listen to messages from New Jersey and other mysterious places.
A call about 8:15 one evening last week didn’t meet my criteria for ignoring it and the area code for the number was 414 – Milwaukee.  I didn’t listen to the message until about 9:00 pm.  The person introduced themselves as Maricolette Walsh from the Milwaukee Irish Fest.  She had read my second novel, Out of Darkness, and wanted to invite me to participate in the Literary Corner this year to sell my book.  She explained she sent me an e-mail the previous week and was worried when I didn’t respond to her invitation.  She took the initiative to call me.
Wow!  I’ve only been invited to two other Irish centric events, the Oshkosh Irish Fest three years ago and an Irish pub in Appleton.  I had attended the 2014 Milwaukee Irish Fest Literary Corner but I wasn’t invited.  At that time the process was to submit your book, someone read it and judged if the author was appropriate for the Fest.
After listening to the message I called Maricolette back that evening and thanked her for reaching out to me by phone.  I wondered how she located my phone number and was dumbstruck that I had missed her e-mail.  Of course, I accepted the invitation.  She said in recent years, with a revised format for authors, that they reported average sales of 50 books for the weekend.   That’s excellent.  The Fest takes 20% of the sales price in lieu of a table fee and they handle all the transactions.  That’s a fair exchange because it frees an author to interact with readers and sign books after they have been purchased.
The next day I searched through my e-mail to see if I had simply missed her e-mail but came up short.  Next I searched through my trash in case I accidently toss her e-mail away.  Again, I didn’t find it in the trash.  The last resort is to check spam.  Was I surprised at what I found in my spam folder!  The one e-mail I didn’t find was one from Maricolette Walsh.  For a time I thought my e-mail address might have been misinterpreted as containing an ‘O’ versus “0” since the letter O and the number 0 are so similar.  However, Maricolette said her e-mail didn’t bounce back.  Somewhere in the universe there is a stray e-mail searching for a home.
It is rewarding to know that someone read my book and thought it good enough to garner an invitation to the 2017 Milwaukee Irish Fest – it is an honor.
Visit me on Aug. 18, 19 and 20th at the Literary Corner of the Milwaukee Irish Fest – the largest Irish Fest in the nation!  
Check out their website - irishfest.com
 
P.S.  How did she find my phone number?  I published both my e-mail and phone number in the in the back pages of Out of Darkness.  Generally I publish only my e-mail and website addresses.  Glad I included my phone number (even if it is a dumb risk).