Words with the Lone Wolf

Fifty Penn Place in Oklahoma City is not your average mall. For one thing, it's vertical: retail and restaurants occupy the lower levels, office space fills up the tower. What's more, it's mostly devoid of chain stores. Instead of the usual panoply of Bed, Bath and Boredom, 50 Penn Place offers a place for beautiful women (I assume unbeautiful women are turned away at the gate, since I've never seen any there) to see the latest manifestations of, say, Stuart Weitzman's shoe obsession.

And there's Full Circle, a bookstore that sprang from the loins of a drugstore turned nightspot, moved simutaneously uptown and downstairs, and competes very nicely, thank you very much, with Messrs. Barnes and Noble and those other out-of-town guys. I was there today to see an old friend try his best to injure his carpal tunnel by signing as many books as people would be willing to haul away. And since Brian A. Hopkins is now a Known Factor, and an honored one, in the realms of horror and dark fantasy, quite a few of those books made it past his pen and through the door. Apparently I'm not as forgettable as I thought I was, because he spotted me quite a distance from the table, though mercifully he seemed to have forgotten my pseudonym from those days. I filled up the holes in my Hopkins collection, we traded stories, and eventually I got the heck out of the way so the next fan could get a chance and the woman behind the checkout (beautiful, of course) could collect forty bucks or so from me. It's an experience I hope to repeat when — not if, but when — he wins that Nebula award.