And so we finally come to the end of my first – and almost certainly longest – national tour. After leaving Kelly’s house on August 30th I spent the night in Tallahassee so as to break up the long drive, and the next day I arrived at Denise’s house in New Orleans. On Monday night I visited Frank and Olivia; on Tuesday I bought myself three new dresses at the flea market, then went to dinner with journalist Jillian Keenan (who had hosted an event for me in New York); and on Wednesday I visited my old friend Charlie and my cousin Alan, then had a lovely dinner with Krulac. I managed to leave fairly early on Thursday, and resumed my normal schedule as soon as I got home.
Well, that last isn’t quite true; while I did cook dinner, put the animals in and all that stuff, it’s going to be several weeks before I’m actually back to normal. For one thing, though I doubled the size of my “buffer” before leaving, it’s entirely gone and will take weeks to build back up to its normal one-month size. For another thing, very few of the columns published after the first week of July were indexed, so I need to catch that back up. Then there are bills to pay, a huge backlog of correspondence to answer, the next book to compile, and my November mini-tour to Seattle and Portland to plan; all in all, enough to keep me busy for the rest of the year. About the mini-tour: though I did manage to make it work, it was extremely difficult (and sometimes frustrating) to have to plan events as I went along, and I’d rather not have to do that again. So, I’m going to start working on my plans for the Pacific Northwest immediately; I hope to have my basic dates locked in by the end of the month, so if you’d like me to speak or read someplace please email me next week with the details. Though relaxation is not in my nature, if I can get the schedule worked out before I leave I at least won’t be quite so stressed.
Given all that, I think it would be a good idea to continue this feature for a while longer; not only will that keep y’all up to date with what’s going on, it’ll also help me to catch up since these diary posts are quick and easy to write. Next Tuesday I’ll discuss the tour in general, and the following week I hope to have the firm-but-not-set-in-stone dates for Seattle & Portland. And in the weeks after that, I can keep y’all appraised of the progress on the new book, the mini-tour and any other activities of mine that y’all might find interesting.
