I met Kyle Minor tonight at his reading here in Chicago. He struck me as very nice, sincere and introverted. ...the same review of "In the Devil's Territory" that I posted here I also posted on Good Reads, and after Kyle read it, he added me on facebook and sent me a "thank you for the kind review" message, which I thought was very thoughtful of him and which gave me a bit of a rush, so then I sent him a message to tell him I was going to try to make it to this reading tonight and he sent me a message in return to tell me that if I came to the reading to be sure to introduce myself, but of course I didn't introduce myself right away because approaching people in informal public spaces makes me anxious, so instead he approached me while I was sitting waiting for the reading to start, and he ended up taking a chair next to mine... and then he was very quiet, and I was very quiet, because although energetically I am mostly an extrovert, I am very bad at starting conversations with people I do not know, especially with very quiet people, and in addition I am completely in awe of Kyle's writing which caused me to completely blank. Of course I could've asked him any number of questions, such as -

How many cities have you been to so far on this tour? Have you been home in between? Are you exhausted? Have you been to Chicago much, or at all, previously? How do you like Chicago? Do you enjoy reading? Do you have a particular copy of the book you use for readings? Is it marked up? How do you decide which story to read? How much of the book have you committed to memory?

...but I sometimes suck at thinking up and asking basic questions like this... so I was quiet and then Kyle Minor was quiet and then Kyle Minor got up to look at books and came back with a book by Richard Price and sat down and asked if I was familiar with Richard Price and I said I have not read him, and he was about to say something about Richard Price but then the reading finally started and we never had this conversation about Richard Price and after the reading I said, "great job" and he said "great to meet you" and I said "you too" and ran out of the bookstore and home.

Still, it was great to meet Kyle Minor, and I am going to use this as a learning experience so that next time I can be better prepared to ask seemingly inane questions like "how was your flight," assuming the person has flown in a plane, so that I will seem less withdrawn and more interested in the other person because I am extremely interested by people in general and by Kyle Minor in particular.