I’m three quarters of the way through this book tour, and I don’t know where I am.

Literally, I don’t know what city this is.  Not that it matters.  Today will be just like yesterday.  Yesterday was just like the day before.

The car will get here in a few minutes and take me to a radio station.  I don’t know the station.  I don’t know the talent or the format.  Doesn’t matter, most radio talent attended the same school of smarmy-over-animated-feigned-interest anyway.  I don’t fault them, or even dislike them.  They’re successful in radio for good reason, and I like listening to the radio in the morning as much as anybody else.  But even the few who read and make an effort don’t usually have enough advance notice to get all the way through my book anyway.  So the questions are always identically superficial.

(If I ever meet the person who decided that authors pimping books should do morning radio, I’m kicking his/her ass.)

My answers will be superficial, too.  Doesn’t matter.  When the car gets here, I’ll get in and go.  Moo.

After, I’ll fall asleep in the car for a few minutes on the way to spend some face time with some corporate types.  I won’t know who they are, I won’t remember their names.  They could be the same people from yesterday, and I won’t be able to tell the difference.  Maybe they follow me from city to city to see how long it takes me to notice.  Maybe they’re even on the same flights, up in first class where I can’t notice.

They won’t know who I am, either, and will likely share my passion for the encounter.

After the suits, I’ll go back to sleep in the car on my way to whatever civic service luncheon I’m attending.

If this is a good luncheon day, I’ll be the guest at a Rotary club meeting (or Kiwanis, or Lions, or ___________), and my only obligation will be to stand and smile and wave when announced.  Then I can sit back down and suffer through a rubbery version of what once might have been chicken.  With rice, always rice.  Required by law, I think.

After, the two or three people who have a genuine interest will come over to my table while the rest file back though the doors to their jobs as doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs.

These two or three will constitute the universe of sincere face to face human interaction I get for the day.

Maybe one or two more will confuse me for someone else and tell me how much their [friend/nephew/neighbor] enjoyed the book(s) I didn’t write.  I will politely thank them.  I will not correct the mistake.

If this is a bad luncheon day, I’ll have to speak and will not have time to eat my rubbery chicken and rice.  I’ll stand at the podium and address a room of professionals who raise money for things like global polio eradication during their lunch hours.  God bless them and their service, but there isn’t a lot of polio vaccination in this book.

(I don’t feel insecure speaking to these groups so much as inappropriate.  Clancy can save face at a conference of security contractors.  Grisham can address bar associations with (some) credibility.  When I have to speak to civic service associations, I always feel like the mistress being introduced to the wife.)

I’ll doze off again on the way to the book store.  I don’t know which of the homogonous major book conglomerates (Walden-Borders & Noble a Million) will have me chained to a table all afternoon wishing for a cardboard mask-on-a-stick to hold in front of my face, bearing a smiling likeness of me.

[I thought up the mask-on-a-stick during my very first meet and greet, which happened to be day one of this tour, after the third person came up to the table and asked “[d]id you really make all this stuff up?” I checked to see if someone at the back of the line was putting them up to it.  I prayed that it was some kind of prank.  Publisher’s hazing, or initiation, or something.

It was not.

So I figure that having a life sized picture of my smiling face on a stick would enable me to endure those questions without having to visibly suppress the gag reflex.]

Honestly, sooner or later, I will vomit on a stranger.  The people asking the boneheaded questions never hear the answers anyway.  I could say, “Oh, goodness, I didn’t make any of it up.  Copied it from other stuff.  Phonebook, mostly,” and they would just thrust their new copy in front of me to sign anyway, wouldn’t miss a beat.  I’m thinking that if my response came in the form of spewing rubber chicken bits, that they would notice.

The publisher’s publicist Patti (say that after a couple of Stolis, neat) hasn’t come right out and said as much, but I’m reasonably certain that blowing chunks on the admiring public (at least, the book buying, book signing attending members) would not boost sales.

Oddly enough, it probably wouldn’t hurt, either.  One or two isolated instances, anyway.

After Walden-Borders & Noble a Million, I’ll go to the airport.  If the flight is on time, I might be in the next hotel room by one in the morning.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Am I complaining?  Oh, how funny.  This is exactly what complaining would look like, if I were complaining, isn’t it?

I know that this is part of the deal.  I enjoy the travel and the people, I do.  I’m just… tired.  The first two weeks were a total blast, the dream come true.  Then the lack of rest and the repetition caught up to me.  The adrenaline (and abject terror) wore off.  Everything since has been blurry, and not the exciting kind.

I’m three quarters of the way through this tour, and I don’t know where I am.  It doesn’t really matter.  Today will be just like the last dozen, and all I have to do is show up and go through the motions.  At least I have the answers.

Back to Cover