“Well, here we are at Porter’s, the store that has inspired two famous novels!”
So began my talk at the launch party for my new fantasy novel The Violet Flash, sequel to The Blue Umbrella. For all of you who couldn’t be there, here’s a link to a VIDEO of the event. It’s 34″ long, so at any point feel free to fast forward to the Q&A session at 20:42, which went pretty well, I think. Many thanks to Arthur Doerksen for producing the video, and to Ron Koyanagi for providing the music.
I’ll just add that Friday, June 17 was a beautiful evening at Porter’s Store as friends gathered from many different corners of my life to celebrate the new book. We had a packed house and I signed my name about a hundred times—a good number, but nowhere near my previous record of 600 signings in one evening. That was at the launch of my first book, The Mystery of Marriage, and it changed my signature. After about 200 signings my perfectly legible Mike Mason morphed into a sophisticated, scribblesome scrawl in which not a single letter of the English alphabet was discernible. And for the next twenty years, that was my signature …
… until the day just before The Violet Flash launch party, when my wife Karen said, “I wish you’d go back to signing your name in a way that people can read. As it is, noboby knows if you really signed their book, or if it was some kindergarten kid, or maybe a baby—or a worm!”
After that, I relented, and from now on I’ll sign books with the old puerile Mike Mason—puerile because it’s exactly the way I wrote my name when I was a child. And the curious thing is, it looks very much like the printed version of my name on the cover of The Violet Flash. Now there should be no doubt that the author himself has really signed your book!
I ran into a similar problem wondering what to write as an inscription. Many readers want their book signed “To So-and-so,” and usually I add some sort of greeting appropriate to the book’s content. For my book on joy, Champagne for the Soul, I wrote “Cheers!” For The Blue Umbrella I often wrote “Blue Skies!” But when it came to The Violet Flash I was stuck. I had no idea what to say. On the internet I searched for idioms related to the book’s themes, but nothing jumped out at me.
Finally Karen said, “How about De Colores?” Certainly color is a major theme in my book, and we’d both been part of a renewal movement called Cursillo, where De Colores (Spanish for “of the colors”) was the signature greeting, a kind of secret handshake. It refers to the title of a song that everyone in the Spanish-speaking world knows.
“But nobody here will know what it means,” I objected.
“Maybe that’s good,” said Karen. “Makes it interesting. A mystery to be solved.”
I wasn’t persuaded until finally I looked up the lyrics of De Colores. And it turns out they’re a beautiful reflection of just what I meant to convey by the theme of color in my book. So, for all of you who may be wondering why I wrote “De Colores!” in your book, here is the English translation of the lyrics:
In colors, in colors
The fields love to dress in spring.
In colors, in colors
Are clothed the little birds all year.
In colors, in colors
Is vested the luminous rainbow.
And so must all love be
Of many bright colors woven
To make my heart cry.
In colors, in colors
Delicate is dressed the dawn.
In colors, in colors
Shine the myriad gleams of sun.
In colors, in colors
The dazzling diamond dances.
And so must all love be
Of many bright colors woven
To make my heart cry.
Joyous, joyous
Let us live in grace while we can.
Let us quench, let us quench
The burning thirst of the King who never dies.
Joyous, joyous
Let us bring to Christ a soul and thousands more.
Spreading the light that illuminates
Divine grace from the great beyond.
Spreading the light that illuminates
Divine grace from the great beyond.
