I always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you. - Mae West
Sometime this week (we’re currently planning for Wednesday) I’ll be leaving on my tour. The first stop is San Francisco, about three days by car; my husband and I have done it in two, but that requires longer driving days than I care to attempt without him at the wheel. This is the longest single stretch of the whole tour; as you can see from the schedule none of the other cities are more than about six hours apart, and I can get home from New Orleans at the end in less than a day. I’m both excited and (yes, I’ll admit it) a bit frightened; though in my younger days I would boldly go off to the far corners of the country alone in a car as long as I knew I had a place to stay at the far end, that was when I had no blog to maintain and enough cash not to care if I had unforeseen expenses. Still, as I’ve said before, personal “growth and development…are driven by confronting adversity and overcoming obstacles”; coping with nervousness, self-doubt, uncertainty, homesickness and other, less definable negative emotions make one stronger and bolder, and I suppose I could stand a bit more of both.
As I explained in “Something Has To Give”, I’ve had to make some changes in the way I do things so as to decrease the amount of time I need to keep the show going while I’m on the road. For the past two months, I’ve been writing as many columns ahead as humanly possible; normally I’m a full month ahead except for weekend columns and usually-Tuesday current event columns, and even then the “From the Archives” sections of my Links columns are done a month out. But with prodigious effort I’ve done all of those through September, all the holidays and special occasions before Mabon, all the harlotographies and back issues through August and most everything else through July; I’m even four weeks ahead on my Cliterati columns and four scheduled reprints will help me to keep up with those. But I’m also doing one more thing that I hope y’all will like: every Tuesday for the next 15 weeks (Monday in the week of July 22nd because of Mary Magdalene’s feast day) I will present “Tour Diary”, a feature in which I’ll tell y’all what I did, who I met and any other thing of interest from the previous week. Since chatty, narrative-style columns are much quicker to write than those requiring extensive research of heavy linking, this will make it easier for me to continue to give you the daily reading you expect without exhausting myself; I also flatter myself that y’all will find my escapades worth reading, and hope that this makes up for possibly-less-polished-and-timely-than-usual TW3 offerings over the next three months. Other nuts-and-bolts details: the columns won’t bear epigrams because those often take a lot of time to locate and select, and the pictures will be ones I take during the week described.
Please send me your prayers, good wishes, positive thoughts or whatever occupies that niche in your personal beliefs, and watch this space in eight days for the very first installment!
