Back from all manner of things. Drove around some, exchanged two pairs of pants at Costco, and then killed some time at the Iliad Bookshop in NoHo. I wish I hadn't. About eight years ago, someone sold a copy of Benjamin Kritzer there. And there it's been ever since. It was signed to someone whose name I don't recognize. So, I always check to see if it's there and indeed it was, which wasn't much of a surprise. What WAS a surprise was to see all my other books sitting next to it - all but the Hofstetter books. I thought it was odd - you never see my stuff in used stores, really. So I pulled out Rewind to see if it was signed to someone. It wasn't. I pulled out Writer's Block to see if it was signed to someone. It wasn't. I thumbed through its pages and it was in great condition. And then something caught my eye - there was a slip of paper that somebody had left in the book. It was an audition notice. And, of course, I knew instantly who'd sold all my books and it was confirmed when I pulled out Album Produced By, which was signed personally to the person who sold them. It made me sick to my stomach. These are people I befriended (I'm sure you're ahead of me on this), people I nurtured (especially one person), people I was there for, a person I gave employment to repeatedly, and a family I could not have been nicer and more supportive of, until they got weird on me and I had to take a break. Since then, I've been apologized to, I've had an e-mail correspondence some months later where I had to set some things straight because there was such stupid revisionist history going on, and I was promised that we'd work past all that crap and start afresh right after January first of this year. That, of course, did not happen. And then they sell all my books - books I gave to them, books they professed to love. Whether the Hofstetter books were amongst them is not known to me, but I looked for them in mysteries and in the new stuff that had been put out and they certainly weren't there. Maybe one family member kept those. Once again, my instinct was to send an e-mail, but I think I'm not going to do it. What I am going to do is have a lawyer send a little letter outlining some dos and don't in terms of work to which I have the rights. They will not be allowed to ever perform anything that I contributed to in terms of writing and/or arrangements - ever. I think divorcing myself from this once and for all and letting this come from an attorney is the best way to deal with it and that's that. And sadly, what they've done here just makes me want to close off to everyone, so that selfish, unhappy people can't do this to me ever again. The End.
