I know that the conventional wisdom is that you’re supposed to hate mall store signings, but I really don’t. I actually kind of enjoy them. Maybe I’m a bit weird (ok, a lot weird,) but the mill of people in a mall always makes me feel more connected.

Spend hundreds of hours in a little room, alone in your mind, and you’ll find out why I like be in hordes of people. Even if it’s only for a few hours, I enjoy the mass of people coming by. I find that I can’t write when I don’t have the experiences of people around me. I need human contact to make the fictional characters in my works come alive.

I like the mall food. Maybe it’s that no one at my house eats Chinese food, but it’s great to be able to munch away on egg rolls and bad fried rice. I even don’t mind telling people where the bathrooms are.. The alternatives are much uglier.

At these mall signings, serendipity surrounds me like Muzak. I had a chance to see an old college roommate, who I hadn’t seen in over 10 years. I met Jonathan Valin’s mother-in-law at one signing. At another, a local film crew asked me to be on the news. Of course, I was signing books in a Santa Hat, so I did stand out.

Maybe it was for all these reasons that I set my new series (The Scent of Murder) in a mall department store. Marissa Scott is a cosmetic department head at the fictional Kantor’s department store in the fictional Westgate Mall in Cincinnati (there are really East and Northgate Malls in Cincinnati.) I have fond memories of all the Friday nights at a teenager at the mall, eating pizza and talking about classmates.

So if you see a man lurking at the edge of the local mall bookstore, it’s not a potential shoplifter. It’s more likely to be me, trying to sell my latest book.