Faster Than Kudzu

Physics

There is a contest/game/thing one entry down – Scroll! Scroll and play!

So with dinner at Sara’s we each injested what I would call a modest amount of Champagne,BUT I have to say we DID get a little giddy from MASSIVE PILE FRIED CARBS WE GOBBLED. OH! OH! Poutine!

Anyway, after dinner, I was still SO excited about the possibilities of riding in the morning that I begged carrots and we all trooped down to the stables so I could make friends with Fancy, the spare mare.

Giddy with carbs, Sara decided it would be a VERY GOOD IDEA to have a little midnight bareback ride on Tia, her horse. Giddy with carbs AND the intoxicating smell of HORSE, I thought so too. Yeah.

Now. Tia is a BUNNY– she’s like 14.3 hands, which for the non-horsey, means she is just a HAIR over pony. She’s spunky, and she’s got such a PRETTY face and is a tidily built and an altogether nifty little horse. LITTLE is the operative word here.

MY horse, the Parker, aka Parker Posey Pony Horse, was a green broke gelding I share-boarded for a goodly span after we moved to Georgia up until I fetched up pregnant with Maisy. At that point, I realized if I did not stop ATTEMPTING to leap tall hedges in single bound (and I say attempting because Parker, Lord love him, did not always make it) Both Maisy-fetus and I were going to end up broken. Parker’s coat was red dun --- very flashy ---a strawberry blond color, and though he had the QH requisite huge round apple of a behiney, his BACK was 50 feet long – very bad. He was a big genial boneheaded dumpling. BIG is the operative word here. He stood 16 hands in his sock-hooves.

For the non horsey, this would mean Parker is to Tia as Michael Jordan is to Billy Barty.

SO. I gave Sara leg up, which means, basically she gathered the reins and crooked her leg and I squatted and made a sling for her leg with my arm and then, straightening from the knee, I threw her onto the horse. Or rather, I threw her onto A horse.

Unfortunately, the horse I threw her on was PARKER.

TIA was CONSIDERABLY under the space that Parker would have occupied, and Sara CLEARED the top of Tia like a HURDLE, at which point gravity intervened, and Sara went splatting down onto the ground on the far side. Tia., THE DARLING, who could have made things bad by stamping on Sara’s face, looked down in faint surprise and then twitched her head in a horse-equivalent of an EYE ROLL and stood waiting for us to be JUUUUUUUST stupid enough to try again.

Which, of course, we were.

IN MY DEFENSE, Sara is a slight little thing, maybe five four, and she weighs about as much a bag of kittens. We DID try again, and this time, I tossed her into the general area of Tia instead of, you know, space, but she was a little borked from the fall and went slithering off again and ended up flat on her back.

At which point, with a mare ROLLING HER EYES AT US for the SECOND time in 40 seconds, even we figured out this was a double plus ungood plan.

You know, I am DEADLY serious when I say we’d had a modest amount of champagne, and we’d eaten ENOUGH CARBS to successfully feed a locust plague of BIBLICAL proportions which you would think might soak it up, and Sara is fit and rides that horse alla stinkin’ time --- and yet truthfully, NEITHER of us had any business operating heavy machinery, even heavy machinery with a heartbeat. And YES, kids, this is me doing another DESIGNATED DRIVER public service announcement, because cars do not roll their eyes and love you and decide not to stamp in your face when you make a bad judgment call. Just saying.

ANYWAY, next morning I DID ride Fancy, and OH LORDY how FUN, but MAN I am SAD AND RUSTY. I barely had enough leg to get Fancy to the rail, and our circles got smaller as she got tireder. I could hear my friend Lydia in my head (she trained Parker) hollering across the ring at me to “GET THOSE STINKING HEELS DOWN” and “DO YOU THINK YOU MIGHT WANT TO, I DON’T KNOW, CLOSE YOUR FINGERS???”

This morning I have a long, slim stretch of muscle running down my inner thigh that feels as tight and twangy as a guiar string – a muscle NordicTrack and hiking with the dog cannot touch. It’s a purely HORSE muscle, and every time I get up to refill my coffee and feel that pleasant and familiar ache, it reminds me how much I miss the whole-body conversations you can have when you’re sitting on a good, good horse.

So…

This is what happened: Monday about a week ago, my dad had some weird chest feelings. We all --- “we” meaning the Jacksons--- have esophagus weirdness conditions that mimic heart attacks, so speaking as a doctor, he decided it was that. Oh wait. He is NOT a doctor. He is a former airborne Army ranger, so speaking as a former airborne Army ranger, he said, “Meh. Probably not my heart, and anyway, I EAT PAIN FOR BREAKFAST. ROWR!” and soldiered on.

Aside: I don’t; know how much of this “Oh what’s a numb left arm and some chest pains between friends” attitude comes from ARMY TRAININ’ SIR! And how much from just…being a Jackson. We are all of us extremely mentally ill when it comes to our own mortality. Very willful. When Death comes for a Jackson, we tend to piffle at him and say he needs to come back later, for we are very busy. Death, startled, has obliged more than one of us.

By Friday, the pain was bad, and he thought… “Hmmm,” to himself. He called his doctor, who met him at the hospital, did a few tests, and said, “Um, yeah, this is not your esophagus,” and admitted him to the hospital.

Dudes, don’t get sick on Friday. Basically he sat in the hospital having little tests and waiting to have big tests until Monday. There were no private rooms, so he was put in with a man named Mr. Crazyhead. <---not his real name. But it should have been.

Mr. Crazyhead was thirteen years younger than my dad, but looked five years older. He liked to take his teeth out and put them in a mason jar, and this, combined with his small, hunchy build and the way lounging in his hospital bed made his long tufts of side hair (the only hair he had, really) puff and hump outward, made him look like a pale, insane Yoda. Mr. Crazyhead took absolutely every pill offered him and buzzed the nurses every few minutes to say, “Please, sir, I want some more,” like an Oliver already so overmedicated his pupils were spinning. When my dad passed on pain pills, Mr. Crazyhead offered to eat them FOR him.

At one point, Mr. Crazyhead went to the restroom and I said to daddy, “What’s he in for.”
Daddy shook his head sorrowfully and said in a dry voice, “Oh, he has TERRIBLE hypochondria.”

Mr. Crazyhead would perch on the side of his bed as we talked to Daddy, head cocked, waiting for one of us to say a word that coincided with a random thought that was pinging around in his brain, and then he would interrupt and yodel and holler the whole thought at us. The thought would be several disjointed sentences long and he would say it quickly, as if he had run out of punctuation marks. Then we would nod at him in a friendly manner and go on talking until a word said by one of us made him ululate out some more thoughts.

They kept trying to release Mr. Crazyhead on the basis that there was nothing wrong with him, and Mr. Crazyhead kept declining to be released. Meanwhile, I would say to Daddy, “Can I get you anything,” and he would cock a hopeful eyebrow at me and say, “A ride home?”

They tried to give him a stress test, but Ranger Bob is in such good shape that they couldn’t get his heart to GO over 130. They kept upping the speed on the treadmill, and daddy would speed up, and his wounded heart would just shrug and adapt and STILL stay under 130. Not that it was a competition---but he is a Jackson, you see, so it probably WAS secretly a competition---not that it was a competition, but every other stress tester in the hospital---even a guy in his early twenties --- got up over 130 before Dad. The nurses kept dragging doctors and other nurses and orderlies in to see this guy in his mid sixties win the Olympic Treadmill Stress Test Gold Medal. And NOT that it was a competition, BUT MY DAD COULD TOTALLY KICK YOUR DAD’S BUTT ON TREADMILL. Just sayin’.

At last it was Monday, and they did the dye test we’d been waiting for, and instead of open heart surgery, which was the big spooky option, they said he needed a stent, which was the milder less spooky option, though not as unspooky as, “You need some medicine and to go home.”

To put in a stent, they go up through the femoral artery in the leg, threading their sneaky way up through the circulatory system to the heart, and they put it in whatever piece is closed up and not working properly. It’s not hugely invasive and they said he could come home the next day. Dad had ONE 80% blockage and otherwise looked super.

Here is the part where your credulity? She is going to feel a tiny strain. Dad declined anesthesia. He got a LOCAL and sat there and WATCHED them do this, fiddling his thumbs as they cut his leg open, and watched on the screen as they threaded up to his heart to put in the stent.

When I heard he had done this I said, “DADDY? Are you DRUNK?”
And he said, in his usual mild voice, “Oh, it was very interesting. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it.”

He’s home now, and perfectly fine, Thank God, except for being irritated by his doc’s orders to take it easy. Mom and I spent the back half of last week trying to keep him from climbing ladders and marching willfully up and down the stairs. I have no doubt that the man would be PAINTING THE HOUSE right now if Mom would let him.

Once, almost forty years ago, when Dad was in Vietnam, he came around a corner of a building right in the middle of their home base camp and saw an enemy soldier had snuck into their perimeter and was standing four feet away, aiming a pistol right at the center of him.

BANG! Went the pistol, and Dad leapt back around corner and started feeling all over himself for holes and blood, wondering where he was hit, because the massive dose of adrenalin his brain had released was overriding any pain he might have felt. But he knew he had to be hit. Four feet away, the guy READY for him, pistol up and aimed before Dad ever appeared. So. The only questions were WHERE and HOW BAD. He felt around, and felt around, and…everything seemed to be in order. There he was, alive and whole inside of the undamaged envelope of his skin.
The guy had missed, MISSED, From four feet away! And so Daddy got to come home a few months later and then about a year after that I was born.

This feels much the same to me.
Ranger Bob, dodging another bullet.

Blah Blah Blah

There is apparently some furfural in Europe about my gerbil, Cozy Mole Mouse…If you can read SWEDISH (I think Swedish???) Please take a moment and go here and tell me WTH is GOING ON??? Tell us ALL in comments. Inquiring rodent owners want to know.

THE COSY MOLE MOUSE GERBILGATE THREAD!

Please note the POLL...Does WTF in SWEDISH meanwhat it means in English? Because it is winning. I may vote for it myself.

ALSO! I keep getting concerned e-mails from people who think I am in danger of buying some toe bells and spending my days chanting at crystals so I can be a little more all-seeing. Actually, I am learning tarot because I THINK I am going to have a rather important character who reads the cards. I think she is sincere and good at it, and I think this bugs the crap out of my devoutly Catholic narrator. It’s an interesting tension that may or may not end up mattering in the final draft, plus I always like games/cards and suchlike in books, both as a reader and a writer. BUT.

I did not spend a week in Cali and return believing even remotely that I have so much as a SPECK of psychic ability. I WISHED I did in middle school – wanted desperately to be KNOWINGLIKE and MYSERIOUS. So my friends and I spent a weeks on the bus home leaning over the seats to take that CARD TEST with the squiggles that Venkman gives to hapless volunteers hooked up to electrodes in Ghostbusters. Our results showed over and over that the entire pack of us combined were less psychic than a box of rocks.

While I DO emphatically believe there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of in MY philosophy, Oh Beloved Horatios, I approach people who claim to have psychic ability with a healthy dollop of skepticism, and that skepticism rises along with the amount they wish to charge me. In this PARTICULAR case, Jill is correct about “next steps” in the comments:

My NEXT STEP was to go get a feminine cleansing. Even though it was free, I skipped it and went to lunch instead as it sounded slightly more gynecological than I was strictly comfortable with. Then I was purportedly needing to go to the same RAWTHER expensive workshop Jill’s aura indicated she was ‘sposed to attend. A small amount of loitering about aimlessly allowed me to overhear two more ladies get the exact same NEXT STEP. Let’s just say that my opinion of these events is currently filed under, “Things that make you go hmm.”

My experience (and interest level, quite frankly) in Tarot is limited. It’s research. I mucked about in much the same way with Ouija for a scene in THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING, and once I got the scene right, my interest dissipated. BUT! As you know if you are a reg, I am a devout Christian, so I will get serious for a moment if you will indulge me, and tell you, at this aura reading, I recognized the VIBE in a QUITE personal way, and became so uncomfortable that I cut the reading short by claiming I had to go to the bathroom.

I have smelled these same AGENDA vapors emitting before -- I whiffed them first in a church. A friend invited me to go to her services – this was years ago –and at that time they had a preacher so slick he seemed OILED. He claimed to have the gift of healing and many other spiritual gifts, and the service was very much ABOUT him and his gifts, if you follow me. BAD JUJU, thought I to myself, and so I took a little wander around the building.

The guy was using a GEL LIGHTBOARD more sophisticated than the one at the theatre where I was employed, and if you have studied lighting design at all, you know how deeply it can change mood. OH, but he was working that crowd! He was charismatic and the lights and music were carefully choreographed to boost his appeal. HOW the money flowed in. I never went back, and not 18 months later that church collapsed when it was learned this guy was both systematically looting the collection dish and sleeping with a great many of the more nubile female parishioners.

You see this subversion wherever people seek meaning, because the search itself is powerful and has influence. There are always those who are waiting for a chance to USE that influence. I suspect that people who attempt to use the faith of others for their own material gain are going to the special hell. Just saying. Oddly enough, I resent the psychic “guiding” me toward a pricey workshop LESS than I resented that preacher, because the psychic wasn’t tapping into my faith. I was pretty much immune.

Pragmatic as I am, I DO think there is more to the universe than what I can see and smell and taste and touch and hear. Faith is a force in my life. It changes my behavior. I believe, for example, that prayer is powerful. I pray for people. I appreciate it when people pray for me. I appreciate it less, however, if they want to charge me five bucks a prayer and are set up to take VISA.

At the same time, I tithe faithfully and give to Christian charities that do things like run an AIDS hospice, operate a halfway house for the mentally disabled, and give homeless families in our community shelter and food til they can get back on their feet. I think these are good things to do, but I know there are charities out there that spend 80% of the money get on “operations” and 20% on the actual work, so I never give money spontaneously, or over the phone, or to a charity I have not researched. I try to give without getting taken. It’s a fine line. We all have to draw it for ourselves.

Living by faith makes tons of these fine lines, and some days I feel they are spread in a web all around me so that I can't take a baby step without breaking my mother’s back. I try to respect other belief systems and yet remain faithful to my own. I try to live by faith and at the same time not let savvy, manipulative, dishonest people use it as a tool to control my actions. I try to be a good person, but I fail, and let pettiness rule my minutes and sour my hours, and I am never as kind or open minded or openhearted as I want to be. I tend to be gullible and yet am often so cynical I make myself angry. I navigate these lines every hour, but they are not things I talk about much here.

I break that habit now to say, please don’t think that because in this blog I speak lightly about, well, everything on earth, that I am insensate to the larger issues. I am not, but this is not the place for them. This place is MEANT to be off the cuff and fun to write, fun to read. I am not interested in discussing The Meaning of Life here, unless you mean the Monty Python movie. If I experience spiritual growth or despair, I probably won’t yarp about it here. I talk about it with Scott and God, and of course it ends up infesting my fiction.

I am endlessly interested in grace, in the imperfect human modeling of unconditional love, identity, the effects of violence, in poverty and privilege, how sex works in and out of marriage, what it means to be a parent, and of course I like blowing stuff up. There’s ROOM for that and a big scoop of plot, too, in a novel. Not here.

I think of KUDZU as a playground. SO! If I, for example, have a spiritual crisis and find myself unable to remember how to forgive, I write THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING, and if I DO talk about it here, it is a single entry that comes in the guise of owls, hidden between naughty pet stories. BUT! If I get told my relationship rose kicks SCOTT’s rose’s buttocks, I ABSOLUTELY have to immediately blog it. AND call everyone I ever met and say so. I MEAN COME ON. You would, too.

INTERESTING AND COMPLETELY UNRELATED AND TOTALLY KUDZU APPROPRIATE FACTOID: Before I left for San Fran, I had plans to go see a TAROT READING CHICK here but um – I drove by and it was on this STRIP CLUB INFESTED street. And not shiny yuppie lets do a naked boobie chicken wing good ol' perverted boys club lunch upscale strip club either – more like the one in THE SOPRANOS. I could absolutely imagine a person getting beaten to death in the back room. So I kept driving. Later I learned that here in Atlanta (and maybe elsewhere, I cannot say) a great many “tarot card readers” with the electric palm signs up in their windows are ACKSHULLY hookers. (!!!!) Glad I chose to ix-nay THAT an-play.

To answer another question in the comments – Heather wanted to know why an indoor technophile such as myself who routinely says things like, “I do not like nature. Nature is where they keep the roaches…” should have a relationship ROSE. It seems more likely that I would have, say, a relationship SPARK PLUG.

I dunno. Maybe this is common lingo. You would have to ask someone more prone to AURA SEEING than me, which would be, um – just about anyone ever born. Box of rocks, remember? Apparently this particular aura-see-er saw I had a relationship rose lurking amid my aura’s barbed wire and cigarette butts... I think we need to focus on what REALLY matters here, which is NOT that I had a rose, but that it is WAY TALLER than Scott's. LA LA LA.

Really though. I think my aura is a big fat liar.. Anyone who has been in a ROOM with the two of us greets the revelation that Scott has a long way to go to reach my dizzying spiritual heights by laughing until they choke on their own tongues.

Scott is very centered and balanced and steadily progresses via reading C S Lewis for FUNSIES while I thrash around and shriek and fuss and argue with God and myself and take ten baby steps forward toward grace and then I holler OH MOTHER MAY I? And back I go in two giant steps. I am venal and vain and dreadful and my path toward goodness is marked by willingness and weakness in such equal measures that it makes loop-de-loops.

If I do indeed have a relationship rose? I betcha it has aphids.

IT LIVES! And Eats Tiny Plates of Lamb with Figs!

I am not the best one at HORN TOOTING and I mean to tell you when things that happen that are good, but then I get HINKY. I get bored with author blogs that are just a series of press releases, you know? TODAY THIS SUPER GREAT THING HAPPENED! SO GO BUY MY LATEST BOOK! But, sometimes, every now and again, a super great thing or two DOES happen and I want to tell you, and then I get all diffident and toe scrubby and decide not to say or put it off until I find I have about 10 things I'd like to tell you but STILL do not as I do not want to be TRUMPETTY and go all LOOKA ME! LOOKA ME!

I wish I had an ALTER EGO. Like a made up CO-BLOGGER named LOUISE who could tell you the good things so I don't feel like Ego McBraggerson. Louise would have a better hair cut than me and wear The High Shoes and march all over New York in them without then getting such AWFUL blisters that she had to go back to the hotel and soak her feet in the ice still melting away in last night's wine bucket. This happened to me last week when I walked from Central Park to the Algonquin in 4 inch peep toe sling backs COMPLETELY unable to get a cab...Louise can ALWAYS get a cab.

I feel like Louise is a red head. But her purse is maybe a LITTLE too matchy matchy with her shoes--like she tried just a SPECK too hard with it and I do think she should have taken off one piece of jewelry before she left the house. If Loiuse was here, she would push her Kate Spade glasses up and say...

"Joshilyn and her editor have been sending out copies of THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING (fondly know to us here as Togwiss) to ask for blurbs, always a nerve wracking thing, especially since Joshilyn is such a FANGRRRL STALKER TYPE. You know she has a hard time speaking to writers she truly admires, and three authors whose books have ALL blown Joshilyn out of the water agreed to read it in PAPER form, not even bound, which is SO beyond generous, really, and then THEY LIKED IT -- enought to say so publicly in glowing prose.

At Chez Jackson, there may have been an indecorous amount of ecstatic screaming followed by a victory-dance-like...flopping motion that I am sad to repoort was not particularly flattering to the dancer, although Mr. Husband reports being amused right up until the dancer stumbled sideways into the big wooden chest in the keeping room and gavce herself a HUGE bat shaped bruise on her leg, and I hope she has learned a valuable lesson about being repulsive and perpetrating victory dances.

Still, if you wanted to go read the blurbs or say something cheerful or encouraging in the comments, I think Ms. Jackson would be flushed with pleasure, although, if there is a merciful God in the heavens (and Beloveds, I DO believe there is) she won't be SO pleased that she feels any sort of AWKWARD SOFT SHOE is warranted. The blurbs may be found on this page if you scroll down."

I kinda hate Louise, now that I've invented her. And on what planet does SHE get to call you guys HER beloveds??? Let's OFF her, shall we? Please? In a creative and painful way? AND BY THE WAY, MANY people have said that I am a very FINE dancer. *cough*

So I am in San Francisco, staying at my friend Jill's house and doing research and this is why I am so quiet. Research so far means eating WAY TOO MUCH South African Tapas and doing a stock signing so I could go hang out with a bookseller I adore from Books. Inc.

Jill and I also met fellow GPC author Cornelia Read yesterday, and she is awesome. I already loved her writing but now I love her, too. Remember the NYC pizza thing? Cornelia said, OKAY COME WITH ME ---NOW IS THE TIME ON SPROCKETS WHEN YOU TASTE REAL YANKEE NEW YORK FOLDABLE STREET PIZZA. She took me to a little wooden SHED where you buy pizza and raspberry lemonade through a hole cut in the wall, and the VERY sweaty shed guy was an east coast transplant...Conrelia calls him part of the PIZZAFARIAN DIASPORA, which is so clever on so many levels Jill and I had a hard time not lurching across the table and kissing her. The pizza was indeed foldable. And slick with grease and dotted with hunks of pale garlic. And SUPER GREAT. I now see what Karen means, but I find it ironic that I had to fly 5 hours west across 3 time zones to actually taste really for true "Yankee" pizza.

And I STILL like Mellow Mushroom, SO THERE.

We were talking about what to do in San Fran and I I have this older lady---an Alabama Expat who tries a LITTLE too hard to go native---and I asked Cornelia if they have support groups for Anger Management now---I wanted one with a good LOCATION though, like an interesting place to meet.

Her: I dunno about anger management, but one time I went with a friend to an AA meeting on a barge.

Me: Did you say in a BAR? UM ... who has AA meetings in a BAR???

Her: *very drily* No no a BARGE. It was LOVELY. But honestly I'd rather have gone to one in a bar. Could NOT get a decent Mojito on that boat.

She's like THAT. You would LIKE her.

Then I went to dinner with my friend Jill's writing group, and we talked JUST enough industry stuff to make the whole thing feel sincerely tax deductable. Tra la.

San Francisco is relentlessly beautiful. Look.

Jill says I need to quit sitting here blogging and come with her to eat Vegan something at this GRAIN HOUSE place -- you will not BELIEVE the menu. I will try to scan it for you. Every sandwich comes with a blessing. NO! REALLY! I am SO happy about this that I cannot express it.

Awards in Georgia, Pizza in New York

I came home to the delightful news that I had won – or rather, Between, Georgia won - the Georgia Author of the Year Award for fiction. I am very pleased and honored!

One goal for this New York trip was to go all AMERIGO and intrepid and discover the here-to-fore uncharted-by-me high caloric wonderland known as Real Yankee Pizza. Karen and I tried to get some first by asking the concierge, and that little prat sent us to this touristy nightmare of a place where everyone wore NO SLICES t-shirts and the thing we ordered tasted like what would happen if you put a little Ragu and some cheese on white pita bread and toasted it. Not just plain old regular blah. This pizza was SO ULTRA-blah it could have made the Boring Food Olympics team and handily beaten China’s Plain White Rice and ALL of England’s Pub Food in the first heat.

Karen is from Philly, and she thinks Mello Mushroom sucks. Now, I think the Shroom is located just left of heaven, so that is a BOLD statement. REAL pizza, Karen says, is flat and foldable and dripping with orange grease and the cheese stretches when you bite off the succulent tip. Humbug, says me. She says I only humbug it because I have never experienced it, and so I was not ALLOWED to leave NYC without giving her chance to convert me to the One True Pizza. After the Toasted Ragu incident, I was more skeptical than EVER, but I agreed to give Real Yankee Pizza a second go.

On Sunday, our last day in NYC, Karen and I woke up so tired and wired that we were on the edge of hysteria before we’d even hit Starbucks to caffeinate. By noon, we were punch-drunk and giddy. On the way back out of our hotel room, repeatedly pressing the button that allegedly called the elevator, we were talking all MANNER of exhausted nonsense.

As the elevator did not arrive and did not arrive, I hypothesized that Karen had been too ROUGH with the elevator’s button and harmed her in the feelings, and now she would not deign to pick us up.

Karen denied it, but even after the elevator had at last lumbered up and grudgingly cracked its doors to allow us access, I maintained the belief that she had made the elevator feel shoved and unappreciated. She countered then, suggesting, as the doors closed, that I may have been GENTLER, but that I had been impatient and punched the button many many times to make the elevator arrive sooner (this completely works, btw) and how this sort of brusque demanding treatment made the elevator feel like I was not really her friend, but only using her to change floors.

The elevator ground to a halt unnoticed by your punch drunk heroines, and as we argued, a woman joined us. As the doors closed behind her, I said, “We could be reading this wrong. Maybe the elevator is a boy.”

The woman’s head cocked to the side like the head of a quizzical dog and she said, in a hesitant voice. “I’m sorry…but..um…did you just say maybe the elevator is a boy?”

I have no idea what came over me. I gave her best deadpan face, then cocked an eyebrow and said, very earnestly, as if slightly worried about her, “No! That would be…crazy.”

She flushed and we stared at each other for five endless seconds. I WISH I COULD HAVE PULLED IT OFF. But I could not. I ABSOLUTELY broke and fell out laughing. She started laughing, too, and she said, “YOU DID! YOU DID TOO SAY IT WAS A BOY!” By then Karen had broken down and was cackling and saying, “Well it might be. How can you tell? I wouldn’t even know where to LOOK on an elevator.” We all stood there giggling like loons for the rest of the ride down. I suspect the woman had been in town for 5 days too and was JUST as punchy as we were.

The second try at pizza, by the way, was better but…meh. Karen says we still didn’t find the mythical IT, the ONE TRUE PIZZA, and is now badgering me to come to Philly to eat something called tomato pie that has no tomatoes in it and isn’t actually like pie in any way. “It’s COLD!” she says, like this is a selling point. I will NEVER fully understand Yankees.

IN OTHER NEWS, here I am, CLEARLY so excited that I appear to be demented, and here is Stephen Colbert looking insouciant and relaxed and gorgeous. My publicist sent it because he is AN EXCELLENT HUMAN BEING with a BIG RED BEATING HEART CHOCK FULL OF VIGOROUS KINDNESS, and MAYBE because he wanted you guys to stop badgering me to get a decent camera. *grin*

Home TODAY....or not.

The tour is officially over, and I am sad and happy, and by the way NOT going home. My family is in FLORIDA right now anyway, frolicking on the single grain of white beach sand the hurricanes graciously left for them. They won't return until Sunday. That's okay, because I have to stay here and live forever at the Ritz Carlton in St. Louis.

See, here at the Ritz Carlton, they went and got a bunch of peeping adorable kittens and then they EVER SO GENTLY combed their belly fur to extract only the softest wisps of angel-fluff, and then they used this magic material to make the bed. I haven't slept the way I slept here since I left home. I slept HUGELY. I slept with passionate mad abandon.

I slept HARD and DEEP and TRUE on Tuesday night, went and did TV and stocking signings and then, in the break before the Library event, I got RIGHT back in that bed and slept even harder with even more deep truth. As soon as the event was over I went BACK to new best friend, Kitten Fluff Bedding, and passed out again. I was SO tired I could NOT manage to drag my body from its sluglike repose in the 1 million thread count arms of the perfect bed, BUT I was starving, and all I had to do was pick up the phone and then a nice lady came to bring me an ENORMOUS cheeseburger. I ate it off the bedside table, hanging my head over the floor to not DEFILE the mattress of paradise with crumbs, and then passed out again.

ALSO? They have DUCKS that live in the turn around. Two young dewy-eyed newlywed ducks showed up one day in spring, and all the doormen adopted them. Then the original pair made MORE ducks, and the doormen adopted the ducklings, too. Now the whole little family has an apartment in the front bushes here and are estatic even though they have no place to swim but the fountain. They have given up all hopes of a lake or pond to stay at the Ritz, and I WANT TO BE THOSE DUCKS.

Seriously. Not. Leaving.

1 2 3 Betty!

I learned a new technique for getting your picture snapped from Sara Gruen. You know how when you are about to have your photo taken, and you say CHEESE and SMILE and then....the person with the camera fusses with the flash and punches the wrong button and the picture doesn't get taken for QUITE SOME TIME. As the seconds tick past, your face starts to seize up and by the time they actually depress the button you have this sort of over-happy rictus-sy corpse face? Like, you can FEEL your face starting to seize up into this horrid plasticene parody of cheerful? YEAH WELL. SO Sara invented the 1,2,3, Betty.

You stand with your back to the camera until the camera person says they are ready, and then you count 1 2 3 and turn around do your best Betty Face. You get a LOT of pictures of the back of your head before you and the camera guy get on the same page...If you are sort of natually gorgeous like Sara you can try for less monkey-grinning and do a sexier VERONICA face, but me, I go for the Betty.

Look, here's me and Sara doing our 1 2 3 Betty and Veronicas respectively:

PLEASE NOTE the AWESOME window display behind us. I wish I had a better shot. The EXTREMELY COOL FOLKS at Park Road Books did this amazing dual window for me and Sara... Sara's side had a circus tent and little hay bales and an elephant under the book display, and my side had peaches by Between and a copy of gods riding in a convertible, AND the dispayed books were draped in kudzu vines. You can see the vines in the pic, but I SO wish I had gotten pics of the circus scene and the car and peaches...

ANYWAY, also from the Charlotte stop, here is another attempt by me and an FTK reg known as dee (of deeceetalks).

In this one I am sort of doing 1 2 3 Maniacal Ax Killer. She has more shots and stuff up at her blog, linked above. I am now all about the 1 2 3 Betty, a true convert, because I think the resulting pics look more like ME, for good or ill. It's at least better than my usual deer in the headlights stiff-mouthed horror. ANYWAY, TRY the 123B next time you have to get a casual snap.

I would like to point out that the 1 2 3 Betty is DANGEROUS in that it DOES tend to reveal your TRUE INNER SELF. Marisa (a mondo-coolio bookseller from Davis Kidd in Nashville) got her legendarily vicious cat to try it. Here is Boo the Bad, doing the 1 2 3 Satan....

OFF TO THAT BOOKSTORE IN BLYTHEVILLE...

I REALLY LIKE ME SOME DOGS....Preferably Fricasseed.

I kid! I kid! I TRULY like dogs. In fact I LOVE the dern things. I find them to be hopeful creatures filled to the brim with simple sweet unadulterated love and goodness. The only reason I do not HAVE a dog is that I haven't had a heart for one ever since the dog I loved most on the earth ever, Hobbes, and then the dog I loved second most, Tobidog, died (BOTH OF EXTREME OLD AGE, thank you) and now that I DO have the heart for one again, Scott BALKED because of my travel schedule.

For over a year my only Petly Interactions came from my inert sack of fat cat flesh whose idea of good company (now that he is An Older Gentleman) is to sleep in the same room I am in. In spite of the fact that he weighs as much as any three cats, Der Schubert is not enough little animals for my house -- and a house without little animals is a dark and sorrowful place.

But Scott said NO DOG at least until I finish touring and finish the next book, but STILL I was in an ANIMAL DEARTH and sorrowful which is how we got the two BROTHER gerbils who turned out to be incestuous and at least ONE brother had some ovaries tucked away somewhere which is how we got to have (at current count) TEN gerbils, ALL OF WHICH gnawed through the cage top and GOT LOOSE while Scott was in Birmingham (he came over to let me see my kids while I signed books), AND so he came home after a two day road trip and had to spent UMPTY man hours with both children playing HUNT INCH LONG SUPER SPEEDY GERBIL BABIES, plus Mama Snicketty and Cosy Mole Mouse (we kept Cosy from the LAST litter to help raise this one because we were for DERN SURE removing the daddy, AKA The Immediate Re-Impregnator, the very moment that the first litter was weanable and adoprable). All ten of the rodential escapees had scattered upstairs and downstairs and tucked themselves into the tiniest spaces imaginable, and how comforting do I find it that my ENORMOUS cat managed to track down exactly ZERO of them and eat them?

Well, on the I LOVE MY LITTLE GERBILS side, I am DEEPLY comforted. On the "sometimes little honta-soaked diseasey field mice get in and want to lick my children" side, I am a little skeeved. Still, on the whole, worthless cat-hunter equals ALL ten gerbils safely accounted for, and that is a definite WIN for our side. BUT... can you see that it would have been better just to get me THE BEAGLE-MIX PUPPY?

Just saying.

ANYWAY. I LOVE DOGS, OKAY?

That established, I will now tell you that I AM SO TIRED I am NOT thinking straight. And I had this terrible terrible exchange with a woman at a bookstore.

Sometimes, in my writing, the vagarities of plot require that I, as a novelist, perpetrate the deaths of COMPLETELY FICTIONAL creatures. Sometimes, these completely fictional creatures are...dogs. And because I write Southern Gothic, my fictional dogs tend to die in SPECTACULARLY violent and disturbing ways. I also kill people---including innocent little children--- with mad abandon, but NO ONE EVER COMPLAINS ABOUT THAT. *sigh* What can I tell you? Sometimes, in my books, things get violent and disturbing. Flannery O'Connor says that SOuthern fiction includes the grotesque always because we are are still capable of recognizing it. So. FLANNERY is backing me on the dogs, kay?

ANYWAY, an animal rights activist and I had the following exchange...Please understand that HER tone is QUERYING and INTERESTED, NOTNOTNOT accusatory or vicious, and my tone is exhausted and insane. Are you with me? OKAY!

Her: I have not read this book *holds up gods in Alabama* but I have heard from VERY ANGRY AND DISGRUNTLED READERS WHO HATE YOU FOREVER NOW, that you SHOOT A DOG in it.
Me: No, I do not.
Her: Well, a dog gets SHOT. And this has turned a LOT of readers off your books...as a volunteer at the Humane Society, the things I have heard are what has kept me from reading this book.
Me: No dog gets shot in that book.
Her: Well, people have told me that one does...
Me: No, not in that book. Dogs get SHOT in BETWEEN. In GODS, they get beaten to death with shovels.

She BLANCHED in absolute horror and I realized what I said. In my tired head I was just setting the record straight about what thing happens to which fictional dog in what book, BUT it came out like the meanest most casual off the cuff YEAH I KILL DOGS ALLA DERN TIME callous hateful thing to say. I thought I was going to burst into tears and then the ABSOLUTE absurdity of the moment hit me...I started giggling helplessly WHICH OF COURSE she thought I was giggling with delight at the thought of, OH I DON'T KNOW, getting the hell out of there to go string up dogs by the feetses and beat them like pinatas....I REALLY wished the earth would swallow me.

She was actually a VERY nice and infinitely patient lady and once I had managed to get myself under control I apologized and explained the scenes and what happened to which dogs and why it happens and pointed out that SHOT dog was actually an abused and mistrained animal that was EATING A GRANDMOTHERLY DEAR OLD LADY at the time of its death and etc... and I asked her to read the books herself before judging me. She was gracious about the whole thing, considering.

I was near suicidal with despair as we left---really it's been one thing after another and I can't seem to do a DERN THING right these days---but luckily I had the Universe's best Media Rep with me. As I sunk down into the depths in the seat beside her, she said OH JOSHILYN LOOK!

We were passing THE HUMANE SOCIETY!

Her: Want me to drop you off there?
Me: You think I could work off some bad karma?
Her: Nahhhh...I was thinking you might want to go by for some of your usual recreation. March in with a shotgun and yell PULL!

She raised her amrs up and n a simple, fluid gesture she TRULY managed to capture the essence of canine skeet shooting...

Oddly, this cheered me up. The ABSURDITY OF IT. Because I've never hurt an animal in my LIFE. I"VE freakin' worked as a volunteer for the humane society MYSELF TOO. I used to be one of their dog-washers for their summer fundraisers, and I have dragged home AN INFINITE number of lost wandering animals and either found their original homes or, if no one claimed them, found good homes for them, and I am the one who, when my old cat died and I was left PETLESS for the first time in my life, realized I was sinking into actual clinical depression from NOT HAVING AN ANIMAL FRIEND IN THE HOUSE..The media reps over the top suggestions kinda put it all into perspective.

But later, tried and alone again, at the airport, I replayed my AWFUL THING I SAID over and over and fell back to brooding over my horridness. Then my phone chimed. I had a message. It was my very favorite media rep again, crooning to her dog that she had managed to get me out of town before I ate him, and then pretending to notice that the message was recording and saying she was calling to wish me a good flight. LORD but I LOVE her. She gets me. I half thought of going to her house and whanging her over the head and stuffing her inert body into my suitcase and taking her with me EVERYWHERE. FOREVER.

You think I am kidding, but considering the way I treat fictional PEOPLE, I wouldn't put it past me...

Bugs, Birmingham, and Blatant Book Promotion

I go to BIRMINGHAM TOMORROW.

See the yellow button? The one that says "Order signed books" that sits under that teeny little cover shot of Between, Georgia over there to your left? WELL. Ask not for whom the button entices with its warm gold glow. It entices for you. The virtual signing, it is upon us. All the Alabama Booksmith Orders will get signed and filled TOMORROW. If you have been hesitating, poised on the brink of punching that button and then turning coyly away LIKE THE MINX YOU KNOW YOU ARE, now is the time to give it up. Punch! Punch now! Lest the punching moment pass you!

I miss my people and my house, but I am not going back for a good piece yet. I am comforting myself with the knowledge that my husband has not yet called MOXIE. In fact (and I hope you are reading this Scott) if the book tour ends, and he has STILL not called Moxie, I may call Warner and beg them to send me other places---cold northerly places like ALASKA and the icier parts of the former Soviet Union, where I am SURE they will love my books and, more importantly, where the bugs don't come.

Right before I left, TWO enormous roaches and a great creeping hairy centipede appeared in my slag pit of doom (aka office). They came staggering out from behind my desk all loopy and slow as if they had been sitting around a hookah casually SMOKING the deadly chemicals I like Moxie to come spray all around my domicile. See, after they spray, the roaches don't come in your house. Of course, you also grow a third eye in your bellybutton, but life is about compromise.

Some nice things are happening---gods in Alabama in paperback just went into its third printing. This is because you are buying it, and you are liking it, and you are telling other people to buy it and they are liking it, and on and on like that SHAMPOO, and WOW but you are pretty. Have you lost weight? gods is also #7 on the SIBA bestsellers list (trade paperback) and Between, Georgia is in a RACE with it, neck and neck at #7 on the SIBA hardback bestsellers list. Once again---why? You are buying, reading, liking, and recommending. Did you just get a haircut? COME SIT BY ME.

I have to PACK UP and get ready to go to Birmingham tomorrow. TONIGHT I am in FAIRHOPE, one of my FAVORITE Alabama towns and HOPEFULLY some members of the Fairhope Posse will come out to see me. Frank Turner Hollon. is there (go read THE GOD FILE, I double dog dare you) and Suzanne Hudson and Joe Formichella. My friend Sonny Brewer is off gallivanting about the country promoting his new book, so he won't show, but I hope some of the others do. It may get interesting.

Joe and Suzanne live near another writer I haven't met yet, but rumor has it he has seceded from the union and formed his own country. He is trying to get a bunch of women to come "Live Free" there, and by free I think he might mean naked. I hope to someday be cool enough to be invited to formally become the Georgia Branch of the Fairhope Posse. I hear REAL members get T-shirts. And Tattoos. If I visit the new country, I will be sure and report back, and, law of the land aside, you better believe I will still be in full possession of my underpants. I don't care to live quite THAT free.

AT ANY RATE, I will be at PAGE AND PALETTE, so come on out if you are a Fairhopian. They do it up RIGHT!
OH number 1--- My friend Mamie was touring China with her daughter and they saw BETWEEN for sale in the Hong Kong airport. HOW. COOL. IS. THAT.

OH the second -- and there is this! Go here and scroll down to LIVE magazine's podcast. This is a BOOK CLUB thing, so if you have not READ gods in Alabama yet, then don't go listen. It has some spoilers. Part two comes out next week.

Scenes from Tour

Tour is WEIRD. It's very feasty-faminey, and if you get feted until you grow The Big Head, fear not, someone will be along to pop it directly.

Scene One: I see a Bookstore that is not on my schedule, but I have a rental car and some time, so I drop in to do a stock signing.
I walk up to a long, thin young man who is putting discount stickers on a gift book.

Me: Hi...can you point me in the direction f the manager on duty?
Him: *straightening* That's me. What can I do for you?
Me: I'm Joshilyn Jackson---

I stop talking because I see I don't have to say "and I wrote gods in Alabama and Between, Georgia." When I say my name, his eyes widen, his mouth opens up into a delighted grin....HE KNOWS WHO I AM. And he is HAPPY TO SEE ME.

He gets all the store stock out for me, and tells me I am going to be at his sister store and that he ordered a copy of gods in hardback to be signed by me when I am over there, and gets me to do him a Between, and calls over another bookseller who has read one or the other of my books and SHE is also quite happy to see me, AND, on TOP OF THIS, a passing woman doubletakes when she sees me signing and stops and is VERY excited because her husband has been wanting to read my book and NOW, she says, she can get him a SIGNED COPY and surprise him, and everyone is all PLEASED, me most of all, and as I leave the manager thanks me for coming by, and I say, oh no THANK YOU for the warm welcome you have made my day, and its back and forth like that for a little, me and him with a stream of OH NO thank YOU! Oh NO, thank YOUs! in this orgy of good manners, and when I finally stagger out into the warm sunshine I am POSTIVELY SHOCKED that the papparazzi aren't waiting in a crafty pack to snap me. Because of me being so notoriously famous and and universally recognized and, dude, I didn't even have to sleep with a Greek billionaire's son!!!!

But then....

Scene Two: I go to a signing. I am pretty much the only one who does.

Eventually, three people show up for the discussion part, and I always think if ONE person comes, you do the WHOLE THING because that one person's time is as valuable as mine. You have to respect that they came out to hear you and give them something to hear. SO, I drag out the dogs AND the pink ponies and tap around HA-CHA!

Then I move to a table at the front of the store, but foot traffic is SLOW. The event manager is a DOLL and keeps me company and assures me they like my book and that they will handsell the signed stock and etc. Two guys show up to ask me ENDLESS questions about who my agent is and how I got him, and then leave without getting a book.

Shoppers hurry past, afraid that if they meet my eyes I will leap on them and make them buy something. I begin to feel like I have GAZE leprosy, so quickly do folks avert their peepers, EXCEPT for one gently rounded little elfy looking guy with tufties of white hair sprouncing out by his ears. He stares right at me. His face is impassive but then he flares his nostrils, as if his nostrils are amused, but the rest of his face is reserving judgement.

I say HI! and in my wake the store's Event Manager says, HOW ARE YOU?

The elf man looks me UP AND DOWN and DOWN AND UP and then turns to the event manager and says, "I'm doing better than HER, anyway" and then walks off, snickering.

The bookstore people were SO nice and encouraging and ethusiastic about my books that, up until that point, I was actually feeling okay about the whole thing, but that was sort of like getting hit in the face with a pan. WHANG!

AH WELL, what are you going to do? For every lovely someone who takes the time to come tell me they enjoy my work and talk about it with me, there are an equal and opposing number of little poos who MUST spit in my Wheaties. There are times on tour when I feel an inch tall, and I pray for a huge and merciful foot to come stamp me.

OH MY DROOGIES, if you live in the south, you should come see me--- here are my tour date for July. Just think, if we get enough FTK regs at an event and that ELF guy shows back up, we can grab him up and throw him in the stew pot and cook him and eat him. MMmmmm, nothing like a tender haunch of boiled jerk to make a girl feel better...

Reunion

YES, Virginia, Wallgreen's sells underpants. Not a huge selection mind you, and not in my size, but any port in a storm, sez me.

Last night was my twentieth High School Reunion. VERY VERY WEIRD. SO Weird. I kept looking around and having deja-ja-vu-vues. Everyone one was telling stories, and I didn't much remember them....perhaps I blocked the four years out? Apparently I had a sass-mouth back in the day.

BAD THING - I forgot my digital. If anyone from the reunion reads this, send me a coupla pics. If don't look like a googly eyed crazy-monster, I'll post 'em.

The Boy I Liked The Very Most ALL through middle school and high school did not SHOW, that potzer, even though he was on the confirmed guest list. The boy I liked the second very most ALSO did not show. ONE boy I crushed on hard showed---he was very much a prototype for what would be my type after I grew up. Tall? Check. Dark Hair? Check. Quiet? Check. ENORMOUS brain? Checkittycheckcheck. He looked exactly the same, only more confident, and apparently he has become some sort of brilliant brain trust person who thinks for a living. VERY cool to see him. I liked him early on in my high school career, before I grew the sass-mouth, and I found out he never even knew I LIKED him. I remember I would get around him and BIG BRIGHT ORANGE LINES of boy-liking would start radiating off my head and I would have to flee before he saw them. *sigh* Really would have liked to catch up with the other two.

20th reunions are nifty. I didn't go to my tenth because I was in Illinois, but I imagine it would have been different. I probably would have had a big chip on and felt like I had to front like a player, like OOOH BUT SEE SEE I am hip and in grad school and I work with an experimental theatre troop and my PLAY just got PRODUCED, yes, in CHICAGO THAT"S RIGHT, NEENER NA---and at the tenth might have gone with some Schadenfreude, you know? That's GONE by the twentieth. We've all grown up --- I liked that about us all, how everyone seemed genuinely interested in each other. The air in the room was heavy with this odd and universal good will.

I was just kinda excited and relaxed (as relaxed as I ever get anyway). I was in jean gauchos and a T shirt until my mother in law told me I could NOT wear that. I called my old best friend at her mom's house and said, "What are you wearing?" After she busted a gut laughing and saying, "If this was twenty years ago, I would say I DO NOT KNOW I DO NOT KNOW WHAT ARE YOOOOOOUUUUU WEARING...." she told me she was wearing nice pants, and her sister said I couldn't slouch in like a scumbag in my jeans either, so I changed not one of my Pretend To Be An Author outfits. I didn't bother to put contacts on though, just peered at everyone through my clunky birth control glasses.

ALTHOUGH, horrid vain thing that I am, I must confess whipped those suckers off like I was Clark Kent any time a Camera pointed at me. AND this guy from drama club accused me of reapplying gloss more than any other woman alive, so, it's not like I am saying I am GHANDI, but...I've grown up a lot in the second ten years. I think we all had.

I might have gotten the teeniest bit tipsy, so when it was winding down and the place we had rented was getting ready to kick us out, one chick came to invite me to go on to a smaller less formal gathering.

Me: No -- I need to go back to the hotel and make out with my husband.
Her: I'll just file that under too much information.
Me: Did I say the quiet part out loud again? OOPS SORRY, it's just, you know, I'm on book tour until the end of the month. He drove down here to meet up with me, and I won't see him until, like, AUGUST. This is my LAST CHANCE to make out. He gets crabby if I make out with anyone else.

I think she needed to keep that TOO MUCH INFO file NICE AND OPEN for me. *sigh* BUT, on the brighter side of celibacy, remember that they had all my flights booked under my maiden name because I forgot to tell my new publicist that my ID is all in my married name? Yeah. Well. So much for not getting any action----Because they had to go in and change my name on every ticket, I have a SECURITY RISK FLAG, and now I am getting felt up in every airport I go through.

OH OH OH! Further humiliations. I stole our old high school literary magazine from 1983! It had a TERRIBLE poem by me in it, I mean BEYOND terrible. I do believe the words "wild white stallion" appear. No, I am not kidding. I'm bringing it to the signing to day in hopes of giving it back. I ran off with it to show Scott and then never could find the people who had it originally and then we left. WILD WHITE STALLION!!!! *dies of mortification* Also, still not kidding, the poemicular stallion is charged with riding me away someplace where "I can be alone!" Exclamation point included in the original. Yeah. Hi. I am a sophomore in high school, but in my off hours, I moonlight as Greta Garbo. Dramatic much?

The state of Georgia really SHOULD fund a grant and give it to me to NOT write poetry.

Tales from the Road

I do NOT have time to proofread this. SO. Try not to be a hater when you see my multiple and enormous typos.

Yesterday, 6:30 PM: I'm off -- On the plane right now, heading for Pawleys Island, The first stop on this book tour. I MEANT to answer some e-mails before I went.....too late now, eh? If one is yours, I will answer it in Agust. I am on the laptop now. BY THE WAY, this would be a great time to punch that yellow button to your left if you want a signed copy of Between (or gods in Alabama --- he has first eds and the paperback in stock, too)----Booksmith Visit is LOOMING UP FAST AND SOON.

SCOTT took Lappy 2000 here by the Geek Squad so they could fix my rebellious V key. Remember last year I blogged in a BROGUE, typing Hae for Have, and etc. Well, the Geek Squad charged me 19 bucks and now I have a working V. YAY THEM. Not to be to technical, but the main problem with the key was that it had a cookie in it. My guess would be white chocolate macadamia nut. Dern cookies.

I ALMOST didn't get on the plane! I have a new publicist (my old one got promoted to Empress of All Publicists, remember?) and it never occurred to me to tell him that, while I WRITE under my maiden name, my Passport and other I.D. and even my credit cards are in my married name...It's little oversights like this that cause Scott to have to walk around charity events with a nametag on it that reads "Hi My Name Is....Scott Jackson," when that is NOT his name. So. There it is. There was no reservation under my married name, and with a growing sense of dread I had the DeltaBot check under Jackson and THERE I WAS.

You know there are the two kinds of behind-the-counter people, right? The kind that are going to MOVE THE EARTH two inches left, if that is what it takes, to get you what you need, and then the other kind, who seem to LIVE to tell you all the reasons why whatever you need is impossible while looking at you so soaked in glee-filled regret that they DRIP IT ON YUR SHOES. WELL! I am sorry for calling her a DeltaBot. BECAUSE I GOT THE FIRST KIND.

I pointed out that my oddly spelled FIRST name was the same on both my ID and the ticket. She processed that, then she wanted to know did I have anything, ANYTHING, with Jackson on it. LIGHTBULB! I had a copy of my BOOK in my laptop case, because I planned to dig through it on the plane and pick out parts to read at the event at Litchfield Books tomorrow, I showed her the book, with my AUTHOR PICTURE in the back.

Now, look, earlier today I had a mental breakdown and went roaring over to my hairdresser's house not THREE hours before I had to get on this plane. AMANDA! I said. I have to go on booktour AND also to my TWENTIETH HIGH SCHOOL REUINION ON SATURDAY. I HATE MY DRAB HAIR! I WANT TO BE FANCY! CAN YOU MAKE ME FANCY??????

Ladies and gentlemen....I am SO fancy now, on my head parts. She put in these very streaky pale blonde highlights, and these very dark chocolate lowlights, and then, in honor of Between's red-headed heroine, added some very cherry red MIDDLE lights in as well. Dude, my head may well be where fancy goes to die.AND I had on my big clunky black framed Kate Spade birth control glasses, which I got because when Scott's old job closed it's Atlanta office and I refused to move to Vegas, the LAST thing I did before that job ended (and it's eyecare insurnce with it) was go blow EVERY BIT of my entire family's Eye Care Allowance for the YEAR on these monstrously expensive frames. I love them, but between the glasses and my striped 'Do, I wasn't sure the author picture LOOKED much like me.

While the helperrific Delta Chick went off to ask her supervsor if a novel was a legit form of ID, I WHIPPED the glasses off, widened my eyes, and tried to make my mouth be the same shape as in the picture---what Scott calls my Deep Thoughts Mouth. I could NOT for the life of me remember how to make that mouth. They were a LONG time coming back, so I pulled out my compact and practiced, and when they arrived, book in hand I gave them my sad version of BLUE STEEL over my shoulder, trying to make my face match the pic without benefit of lights and professional make-up and a monstrously talented photographer, They looked at me like they already regretted it because I was CRAZY, but told me they had ALREADY believed me, even without me replicating Deep Thoughts Mouth, and gone ahead and changed the name. Yeah -- They had taken so long because they were printing out my boarding pass. AND HERE I SIT. Whoops landing must shut down....

BUT FIRST! GUESS WHAT I AM DOING RIGHT NOW! Eating a little pack of Delta Gingersnaps! Directly over my keyboard! Oh Geek Squad, go ahead and sign the lease on that new Porsche----you are all but guaranteed another 19 bucks.

UPDATE THE FIRST: When I landed, I discovered that my luggage had not come with me. Aparently, it FAILED to look like its author photo, and was left on the ground. The bookstore owners took me to Walgreens to buy Crest Toothpaste and Underpants, and then took me to an AMAZING place called ---I will get the name for you - I can say it but can't remember how to spell it. *sigh* Louis? ANYWAY, they fed me on Shrimp and Grits and enormous cocktails until I felt better about the whole thing. Seriously, in the top three Shrimp and Grits EVER, and you KNOW if a place has S-n-G on the menu I don't have to read any farther. ALSO The Vodka Soda Lime was made with a local vodka, called FIREFLY, and it was....awesome. Today is Travel-Crumple-Walgreen-Underpants Day, but derned if I don't feel JUST FINE about the whole thing.

Keepsies True or False

While we wait to hear who won B4B (Judge Jennifer O'Connell is touring, so we shall be patient like spiders...) Let's play round 2 of CONFERENCE TRUE OR FALSE. In Saturday's PRACTICE round, all those things, every one of them, was shamefully true. Even the butt thing. *sigh*

This time, we play for keepsies --- Prize is the long-ago promised signed UK edition of gods in Alabama.

RULES:

-- If you were personally AT THE CONFERENCE, you cannot win.
-- No less than 1 and no more than 5 are false. Just write the number(s) of the FALSE ones in your comment. That's your entry. First to list all the Falses without listing any of the Trues wins.

1) Three people separately told me I look like Joan Cusack.

2) One person told me that, in my glasses, I look like Merryl Streep.

3) One person told me I look like Bernadette Peters.

4) One person told me I look like Jessica Simpson.

5) One person told me I look like Jessica RABBIT.

6) One person told me I SOUND like Kristin Chenoweth. In Wicked. As Good Witch Glenda. Heh.

7) One person, who was seated at the back for one of my sessions, came up to me with a copy of gods for me to sign after, and did a little double take. She said, "I hope you do not take this the wrong way, but you are prettier than I thought you were. I mean, you look better when you are CLOSE UP."

8) One person overheard me talking about the book and she said, "Wait, YOU wrote gods in Alabama?" And I said, "Yes." And she rallied a bunch of spit into her mouth and seemed to think about PUTTING the spit on me. After a long, spooky, freakishly charged moment, she gargled, "Congratulations" in the iciest tone she could muster through all that spit, and then pretty much turned her back on me. She didn't speak to me or look at me even once for the rest of the weekend and whenever I came into a room she seemed to be galloping out of it. I have NO idea what it was about, but my inner neurotic would construct a whole new 'nother elaborate why-she-hates-me scenario every time I caught a glimpse of her...

9) At 9:45 on Saturday. I went down to the B and N booth to buy a couple of books I wanted to get signed while I was there, and did not see my own book for sale. They told me that they hadn't been able to GET any copies of my book because INGRAM'S (which basically distributes for ALL THE SOUTH) told them they either didn' have or were not carrying my book. I can't tell you how bad this is. A large percentage of my sales are in the south. I PANICKED and left a LONG WEEPY, HOPELESSLY PATHETIC message on my editor's machine. The machine AT HER HOUSE. ON A WEEKEND. I SNUFFLED for the love of pete, SNUFFLED, and asked didn't Ingrams LIKE me anymore? What had I done? WHY! WHY! I had ALWAYS liked INGRAMS? Could we send Ingram's a NOTE asking if they still liked me with boxes to check that said yes and no and maybe? pulepuleweep. Then I went back downstairs and was told they had gotten my book mistaken with another that they had not been able to get. They actually HAD had copies of the book, it was just they sold every copy they had within 30 minutes of opening the bookstand. Heh. I considered leaping on a plane to my editoprs house and doign the Seinfeld-style break in answering machine tape swap, but settled for calling back to leave a chagrined "Um, nevermind. So, how about them Yankees" message.

10) The first thing I did when I got there was lose my nametag in the potty. Then it was returned to me. The second thing I did was lose it again. Into a black hole. They made a hand-written tag. I took it off at supper, put it back on later, wandered around for an hour, and then looked down to see my tag said I was JANET SOMEONE. I took it off and went to find Janet Someone, but lost THAT tag by the time I found her. HEH.

11) When I turned in my expenses, I basically added up my $16 soup-salad-iced-tea lunch as a $160.00 lunch. That must have been SOME good soup, huh? That gave the conference chair the DELIGHTFUL task of approaching me to try and delicately tell me my math might be the TINIEST BIT off. HEHE. How would you like that job? She was very polite and delicater about it, and I laughed and said, "Oh, see, the problem was you asked me to do math in the first place."

12) After standing at the front of a room leading a two and a half hour session, I began to SERIOUSLY hate my chocolate brown knee boots with the four inch heels.

13) After three Amstel lights and half a Mini-Bottle Super Madras, walking down to the beach in my chocolate brown leather knee boots with the four inch heels seemed like a GREAT IDEA, so now I need new chocolate brown leather knee boots with four inch heels.

14) The phospherous was active (although after three Amstel Lights and half a Mini-Bottle Super Madras, I couldn;t remember the word PHOSPHEROUS and called them/it "the diatoms, the light up diatoms, you know they are like diatoms in that they are little, but more, you know, ELECTRIC in that they light up, so not REALLY like diatoms but small like that. Also, I once ate diatoms. In earth. Diatomacious earth. Tasted kinda lemony, for dirt.") I am pretty dern blase about the whole "beauty of nature" thing, but it was SO spectacular that I kept interrupting whoever was speaking to shriek "LOOKIT THAT! LOOKIT THAT!" every time the phospherous popped and bloomed like a firework set off under the waves.

15) I had a SMASHING good time. It's a great conference.

Near, if not Actually HOME ON, the Range

I am home!
Sort of. I am off the boat anyway. And SO grateful to celebrity guest blogger Mir (of Woulda Coulda Shoulda) who was given MOD ACCESS TO KUDZU and never ONCE abused her newfound posting powers to perpetrate a A Very Bad Word Indeed upon these hallowed and generally PG-14-Year-Old-Nephew grounds. She never even ALLUDED to Female Problems Better Not Discussed. I am proud. Most importantly, she stepped in and ran B4B single-handedly. She. Is. Pretty.

Also, big thanks to celebrity guest author Melanie Lynn Hauser (whose book, Confessions of Super Mom is garnering great reviews) and MORE thanks to the B4B entrants who have kept Kudzu metaphorically floating in quality reading material while I was floating in a more literal and Atlantic Oceanly manner. The WINNERS are in the entry right below this one, posted by her beautimous Mir-liness. I'm so out of the loop of my OWN DERN BLOG that I started reading the second half of the ORIGINAL ENTRIES today with my morning coffee. WOW am I GLAD I delegated the job of narrowing the entries down!

SO back to the being sort of mostly HOME-ISH.

I am HOME in an AMERICA sense but not in the sense of MY house: I am at my mom-n-dad's place. But I WAS home, for a minute. Day before yesterday. Then I kissed Sam 500 times until he was all, MOM OKAY I MISSED YOU TOO JEEZ, and then I snatched up Maisy and we got in the car with my dad and came over here to meet with the Tonya Terry's Book Bunch in Mongomery. I was on WSFA's morning show, and then met with their very large and VERY chatty and VERY VERY OPINIONATED group of exceptional women (and one man) last night. The interview with Tonya (she's a PISTOL!) can be seen in streaming video here.

I wish the meeting could too, quite frankly.

Let's just say that gods in Alabama ended up being a SLIGHTLY controversial choice... A large and (Thank you, Lord) very vocal segment really took to the book, and I got that satisfying sense I almost always seem to get during book club visits---that these are more than surface readers. Very few of them missed a trick, and as always the reactions and opinions varied widely. I never regret finding time to go to book clubs.

There was a (Thank you again, Lord) much smaller contingent (about four) that wanted the book banned, and one of that number thought banned didn't quite cover it. She thought that all copies of the book should be gathered into a heap and set on fire and then I should be tossed on top of the burning heap in a literary version of suttee. She hadn't made it out of Chapter 2 when she became SO enraged with Arlene's *cough* blunt vocabulary and *cough cough* frank depictions of ...let's say, "scenes of a delicate nature" that she took it BACK to the bookstore, yelled at them for CARRYING such smutly filth, and demanded her money back.

Digression: I got tickled about that, because how much do you want to bet that ALL of those booksellers have now read the book? I dare to think that most people who read it like it, And if you can get a bookseller to like it, they help it find its readership. And by "Its readership" I mean, the folks who don't stop reading two chapters in to begin the laborious process of mailing me some dead animals or bombs because of Arlene's cheerful, uncomplicated relationship with the F word, and her incredibly convoluted relationship with the act that the F word purports to represent. If you follow me.

My favorite of the nay-sayers was the woman who did not attend but sent her friend with this message:
"I think the title was very misleading. I thought it would be a religious book, but this book is so graphic that it ought to have been called "OH GOD! OH GOD! OH GOD! In Alabama."

I may disagree with her assessment (as I have said before, I DO think of gods as a "religious book...") but HA! What a GREAT line! She should write reviews. I also liked meeting Tonya's co-anchor who greeted me with, "Oh, is this the Effin' author? How the Eff are ya?" He'd read the letter from the this-is-smutly-filth-book-returner, see.

AH WELL. ONWARDS, HO! (With the Ho being Arlene, apparently.)

BUSINESS: If you have written me e-mail in the last 2 weeks, I most likely have not answered you. It cost 50 cents a minute to have web access on the boat. YARP! I am going to catch up on all that my-real-life-stuff on Monday. Today I am driving home, and Scott and I plan to spend the weekend hanging out with our kids and our cat and our newts...

I have MANY MORE boat stories to tell you, About Jacek and Nicola, and what I have named each of my five COUNT THEM ...FIVE! brand new pounds of cruise-induced butt fat and my 20 day plan to murder each of them in turn, and about Why I Will Never Have A Second Career in the British Royal Navy (alternate title: Adventures of a Puffy Pink Puker) etc etc etc, and I shall try to not let all this stuff go the way of the roller-blade socks, but you know, every day, more life keeps happening. You can't stop it. So.

Ex-Pat Cosmopolitan Bathroom

Hi. I am violently ill.

No, I did not eat a bad banger. No, Isaac-the-bartender didn't talk me into trying a spangle-french-Bellini shooter or seven. It is the WAVINESS. Good LORD, but the ocean is very MOVE-Y. This morning I stood out on my little balcony and exhorted the dern thing to PEACE, BE STILL, but it ignored me, even when I offered it my breakfast as a sacrifice. Stupid ocean. The boat tips around and sloshes while all of me stays still except my stomach, which chooses to slosh cheerfully right along with the waves.

After a perfectly miserable morning, I learned you can get injections for sea sickness at the clinic, and as a BONUS, the shots make a person dreamy and pleasant to be around. The injection works FAST, and then suddenly you are cruising along, seeing tigers and singing tuneless little songs that celebrate the beauty of the word marmoset. So that's all right then.

As soon as I had finished with the naseua and its accompanying "praying for death," I began having a FANTASTIC day. Scott and I are now QM2 certified to CHA-CHA. We can do basic cha-cha, and also he can TWIRL me, and also we can do a move called THE NEW YORK. But only if we do these steps in a certain order. We experimented with a little free style cha-cha-ing, and it invariably leads to toe stomping and bonking into other dancers and madness. So we sit near the dance floor, hovering like cha-cha vultures, waiting for the right sort of beat, and then we leap to the floor and do three basic, twirl once, then straight into two sets of THE NEW YORK and bang-oh, tally-ho, Bob is one's uncle, and there we are back at basic. Once back at basic, we lather, we rinse, and we most humbly and obediently repeat. Tomorrow we shall learn to do about three tango moves and then go do them over and over in the exact order we learn them, OH such`good little dance monkeys are we! Hopefully we will also remember our CHA-CHA sequence, and so tomorrow night we can leap onto the floor twice as often and feel VERY pleased with ourselves. IT IS FUN AND ROMANTICAL to ballroom dance, even BADLY.

Tonight we have been invited to have drinks with the Commodore, and I am feeling very posh indeed! I am wearing shoes that are SO excrutiating I think they are ILLEGAL in 14 states but OH lordy, are they pretty? Why, Yes. Yes, they are.

ALSO we took a bridge class, and played bar trivia, and listened to Harrison Ford explain the origin of the planet while watching a ceiling film in the dome of the planetarium and yes, YES, you heard me, they DO have a planetarium on board, as well as Oxford dons offering lectures about modern art and dada--that's tomorrow. Scott is SO happy. OH they have this art auction and we were wandering through just LOOKING and we saw this painting, and Scott said, "Wow -- that guy was so influenced by Chagall he might as well BE Chagall." And then we looked at the signature, and um. It was. IT WAS CHAGALL. They have FOUR of them. FOR SALE. We stood there googling at it like rubes and then noticed a one-eyed woman by PICASSO was loitering all bizarrely profiled right beside it. FOR FREAKIN' SALE. OH man, I am COVETING.

Also on board, Dick Francis. That's pretty cool, too. When I was VERYVERYVERY pregnant with Maisy I went through this DICK FRANCIS thing where I read everything he had ever written. I could read one about one every two days, and nothing else made me happy. NOTHING. Even Jane Austen irritated me. It was DF or bust, DF or nothing, DF or listen to me sit flat-bottomed on the floor with my legs spraddled, wailing "LITTLE FAT PREGNANT IS TIRED! GET IT A BOOK! IT WANTS A BOOK WITH HORSES IN!" Scott, who probably SHOULD have spanked me to death, would instead kindly go get me another DF mystery, and I would shut up for 4 or 5 hours at a time. It was a good system, especially the part where I didn't get deservedly killed.

WHOOPSIE lookit the time. I need to suspend my disbelief and go nibble on dramamine and then put on my twirly-skirted green spangle dress and The Cruel Shoes for the commodore's cocktail party. And THERE'S a sentence I never thought I'd say....

Last Night in London

Yesterday I went and met my UK editor and several other Hodder editors and a great deal of the publicity department and various and sundry other people who...um. I don't know. Let's just say they "work in publishing" as my understanding of the way a business is run is SO rudimentary that is pretty much a LARVAE. And not even a larvae who is likely to blossom into a less rudimentary dragonfly type understanding. More like a sulking larvae. An ungrowing, crabby with little larvae with clinical depression and a Prozac allergy.Oh heck, not even. More like a dead larvae. But anyway, I met some people who have jobs I don't understand, but that mean the great wheels of the publishing industry grind on, so we likes them, my preshus, indeed we do.

There was a little champagne reception among the boxes and orange crates (Hodder is moving offices) AND! The VP of sales AND the VP of marketing came, which delighted me. Those are good people to have liking ones book. Gods is gettign the same kind of backing from Hodder that it got at Warner, and oh my goodness...I can't tell you what the backing of the house means, but it probably rhymes with, "beverything." The way they've aken to gods warms the cockles of my heart, or, alternatively, whatever internal organ actually HOLDS the cockles, assuming girls even have them. Which I doubt.

I also got a brilliant bit of news (<--note my obnoxious slang appropriation is not stopping. And brilliant is just the TIP of my anglophile iceberg. I have completely banished "TENNIS SHOES" and even "SNEAKERS" from my vocabulary. I have TRAINERS now, thanks much, because that's what WE over here in ENGLAND say. Since I was a resident of London for FOUR SOLID DAYS I am practically a NATIVE. So. Trainers. But I digress....) As I was saying, I got BRILLIANT bit of news while in the office, but I don't know if I am allowed to say yet, so I will say it later. IT IS NICE THOUGH!

My editor is funny and a charming conversationalist, which one expects editors to be, actually, BUT she is tall, which is new. My U.S. Editor and a few of her fellow editors I have met at Warner and my publisher and my publicist are all petite, like 5'2' and slender to boot. When I first met them I was intimiated because they all had good shoes and glossy hair and came up to my bosom. Tall women intimidate me less, probably because I am tall, BUT...On the other hand, my UK editor is ridiculously pretty which can also be intimidating. I swan, I am used to it though---my personal and anecdotal evidence indicates that that is just the way editors ARE, everywhere. There was a gent (<--SLANG APPROPRIATION!!!!) there, in his forties I'd say, also a Hodder editor, and he lifted his champage glass and waived it at all the ridiculously pretty editors and said, "I guess the reason is plain why *I* went into publishing." At any rate, she was very chatty and easy to talk to, so I didn't get the shy's or have a nervous prostration or pour wine down my front.

Then my editor took Scott and I to lunch at a RAWTHER POSH SPOT <--- SLANG APROPRIATION! OMG you should have SEEN the ceiling--a mosaic of all these tiny mirrored tiles. It was made in the 1800's. Just gorgeous. I ate a warm goat cheese tart that I shall always remember with fondness.

We are now on board the QM2 and I have to go find the GYM because OH LORD but bangers and mash are good. Under good, file also: Fish and chips and the INDIAN FOOD in London. I am STUFFED on chutney and prawn curry ("PRAWNS" is what WE over here in ENGLAND call ....oh how do you Americans say it....shrimps? heheheh OKAY, OKAY, I am stopping. Soon. Probably.) And I have to tell you about the plays we saw on the West End -- we saw Sienna Miller and the ASTONISHINGLY CHARISMATIC AND AMAZING Helen McCrory in AS YOU LIKE IT, and that won.

QM2 pics and info later ---I need to go throw streamers and find Julie-our-cruise-director and MORE IMPORTANTLY, Isaac-our-bartender and learn where the lifeboats are. Scott tells me that they have instituted this new POST TITANTIC safety program where they have enough lifeboats for EVERYONE on board! HUZZAH!

London Pictures

B4B note -- If you do not blog and yet you want to enter, you can send your essay to ANNE FITTEN aka Edgy Mama, and she will put it up on a blog especially created to host entries. Her email address is

janus@annefittenglenn.com

I can't make links work right now GAH. Edgy Mama is on my BLINKS PAGE and you will have to write out her e-mail address...SORRY. And now some of the pics I promised you!

At my hotel, there is a picture of this guy we call Lord Nipple. This is him:

I don't understand why he is wearing see through armor, or what disease he has contracted that could cause flesh-lions to grow from his bare shoulders. BUT OKAY. I admit I enjoy the presence of Lord Nipple. I like his supercilious nose, and you have to admit, he's pretty bold to sit out in the living room and receive guests in such garb. I am trying to convince Scott that we need to kiss our hands and slap Lord Nipple's belly every time we pass his portrait, but Scott resists joining me in what I feel is a fitting tribute to Lord N's unapologetic nipple-ness. I think Scott holds back because Lord Nipple is right by the Concierge, but see, I think that's what would make it CHALLENGING. We would have to come up with elaborate schemes to distract the concierge long enough to carry out the belly-slap of nipple tribute. Alas, it is not to be.

I want to look him up when i get home and get the story.

HEY -- I found an independent bookstore yesterday in my quest to sign every copy of gods in Alabama currently out in London. That was cool -- it is called Foyles, and it was family owned and every bookseller there was a READER. They had quite a few copies of gods and it had very nice placement, and hopefully one or two of the handsellers I met there will follow up and read it and help it find readers. Just one or two can make quite a difference...I also went to several chains, and talked to booksellers there----met some MORE booksellers who read and that's always so heartening and delightful. I LOVE finding booksellers who essentially think selling books is not the same as selling cars or coffee---who love what they sell. Here they have different chains than we have in the states; Books, INC and Blackwell's and W. H. Smith and Waterstones---No Barnes and Nobles, although they do have Borders here. I have YET to see an OTTAKER'S, and I really want to find at LEAST one, since they made gods their August book of the month...maybe today.

LOOK This was at the tower of London --- This is a GUN!

I like the goat-lion-thingy, cheerfully holding up the heavy end. It seems an odd thing, to tart up a very large and destructive weapon until it looks like a cheery carnival ride. It's a very medieval thing to do, though. Scott and I love medieval history and theatre, so we are pretty much in heaven here.

West End theatre is VERY different from American theatre. Not in terms of quality -- there's no choosing between the West End and Broadway. Superlative acting, gifted designers, great directors are par for both courses. But here theatre is much more ACCESSIBLE. You can wear jeans, whereas in New York it's more...social. The theatre tickets are the one thing that's CHEAPER over here. Here, a burger that would cost you three bucks stateside is four or five pounds. And a pound is worth 2 dollars. just about, so. Do the math, it;s doubly doubled. At the same time, a theatre ticket that would cost you 125 bucks is only 40 pounds. There is this feeling that theatre is fun and a nice and for everyone. Stateside, in New York it is a BIG event to go because it's so prohibitively expensive, and you dress up for it. It's an event, not something you do every weekend. Out of New York theatre, excepting travelling LION KING productions, is often seen as elitist---something for big smarty-pants intellectuals. Going to see THE CHERRY ORCHARD is often viewed as GOOD for you, like medicine or spinach, but not necessarily a pleasure. But here, it seems theatre is just one of the things everyone can go and do for fun. THIS IS RIGHT AND GOOD AND SMART. I envy it.

That's me, looking dyspeptic in front of the sunken garden at Kensington Palace.

And this is one of the Ravens at the Tower of London. THEY ARE AS BIG AS CATS and they CANTER around like 2 legged black ponies.

MORE LATER --- This is our last full day here and Scott is making impatient noises. Lord Nipple awaits our passing, and beyond him, all of London.

Mercy on the Side

TODAY! I am leaving for England! For England! For England!

Things I am excited to eat, even though I don�t really know what some of them are:

Bangers and Mash (no clue)

Toad in the Hole (This is EITHER an egg fried inside toast or a mysterious sausage)

Bubble and Squeak (no clue, but who wouldn�t want to eat that? It sounds cute and friendly.)

Pie and Mash with Parsley Liquor (no clue, but it has PIE in it. And it has LIQUOR in it. Sign me up.)

Lancashire Hotpot (no clue)

Ploughman�s Lunch (Bread and cheese and a bit of pickle. I have it on good authority that one needs to eat this with beer)

Here is a list of all the things I categorically refuse to eat, even though I don�t really know what some of them are:

Kidney Pudding (Just reading the words makes me smell pee)

Bacon Roly-Poly (Down here, a Roly Poly is a BUG. So.)

Pease Mash (A sauce of boiled peas that some places put on fish and chips---it�s been described to me as �finger soup.� )

Black Pudding (THIS IS SOMETHING MADE OF PIG BLOOD AND LARD! IT IS FOR BREAKFAST!!!! I USE ALL CAPS TO INDICATE THAT I AM SCREAMING!!!!!)

Stargazy Pie (This is a fish pie and that seems fine except it is called stargazy pie because the fish are cooked tails in, heads up, which indicates that the HEADS are still on the fish and the GAZY part of the name indicates that the EYES are still in the heads. I can�t eat things that look at me. Or even things that look at the stars. I can�t eat things that look, period.)

Marmite (It is brown and in a jar and makes me think, inexorably, of creamed marmoset.)

Oh wait. I am from the South. Her we eat hairy slime (commonly known as okra) and we invented the Fried Dill Pickle. I have relatives who routinely say, �Slop yer aigs around in them grits, honey, and then sop up the yallar with your biskit!� We have Mullet Fries. We came up with CHITLINS and have been known to PICKLE the FEET of perfectly nice pigs.

I probably need to set this rock down and get out the windex so I can polish up the walls of my pretty glass house.

Next time we speak, I will be across the pond.
I WILL TAKE PICTURES!

Humble Bumble

One of my regular blog-and-coffee morning reads, Fresh Eyes , is talking about bookstores and humility in response to NYT best-selling novelist Tess Gerritsen's 8/24/05 (scroll down) blog entry about her spiritual slaughter at the hands of Hawaiian booksellers. OH MY FRIENDS. Let me tell you, you don't have to go Maui to get thoroughly belittled! If you want to understand the smallness of your space in the universe, all you have to do is drive down the STREET. People in your home town will quite often be happy to oblige, because, hey, nothing good can come out of Nazareth! Of course, given my druthers, if one HAS to be humiliated, I say, better to do it in Maui and then comfort yourself with a GIANT hollow pineapple filled with rum and melon liqueur and juices and plastic mermaids and teeny tiny umbrellas.

Mine for Summer: I heard from no less than three people that a local store was out of my book. This store is the CLOSEST bookstore to my house that exists (if you do not count a beloved small independent children's bookstore). These three people ALL went in to PURCHASE gods in Alabama and couldn't. I heard this from these people over the course of two weeks, so the store had apparently been out for quite some time.

I went by near the beginning of August. I snagged a bookseller who was near fiction, introduced myself, explained that I was local, asked him if he had read it, asked him what kind of books he liked, he listed some authors that led me to think he would probably like my book, so I told him so. I asked him to read it, asked him to help readers find it, told him why he might like it ETC. ETC., just talked about it with him and made sure he knew people had come to the store wanting to buy in the last two weeks and did they have any on order and I would be happy to sign their stock when it came in and ETC. ETC. ETC.

I left feeling better. He seemed like a good guy, a READER you know? I am always disheartened by booksellers who say "Oh well, I don't read very much," when I ask them what authors they like. This has happened more times than you would imagine! It's like a devoted environmentalist selling cars..."Oh well I wouldn't drive one of these air poisoning death machines for a million dollars and think that anyone who does is going to spend eternity on a spit being slow-basted by the hounds of The Arch Deamon Mechasadaic, but if you have 20 thousand bucks and don't mind destroying the earth and all, I would be happy to fill out the paperwork that will charge you exorbitant interest AND damn your immortal soul...Want some organic soy gum?"

ANYWAY!

On the way out I see they have a HUGE DISPLAY SHELF up of Local Authors. RIGHT at the front of fiction. Seriously, except for NEW RELEASES and BEST SELLERS, it's probably the nicest placement in the store. They have put EVERYONE who lives in Georgia up there---even people who I KNOW live in ATHENS and SAVANNAH. And all the books have big LOCAL AUTHOR stickers on. Pretty much every Georgia author who comes out in hardback from a NYC house is up there. Except um ... one. That would be the one who lives 7 miles away. If you are this store, you cannot GET a more local than me. BUT OKAY THEN!

Honestly? My feelings were a little hurt. I'd been in the store before when gods came and had introduced myself to other booksellers there. BUT I thought, well, maybe it WAS up there and they sold out? But I can't help but notice there is no HOLE where another book could go...The shelf is full.

A week later, I go back to follow up. Still no copies. Not on the local author display. Not anywhere. I go and talk to one of the booksellers there again, the fiction section manager this time, intro, ask about book. OH yea, she says, people come in here and ask for that book a lot. Let me see. I will go ahead and order some right now!

I watch her order five copies, rush job.

I mention the local authors table and she says, But your book says it's in Alabama.
Me: Yes, the book is set in Alabama, but those books aren't all set in Georgia. They are just written by Georgia authors.
Her: But your book says Alabama on the cover.
Me: But....yes but. I know the book is set in Alabama, but... I live 7 miles away.
We look at each other for a minute.
Her: Okay, I guess we can put you up there.

Went back yesterday. No on the display. No copies in the store.

Hypothesis one: In the grand scheme of things, I am simply not that important. These book sellers have a lot of other things to do, and fixing my stupid little personal problem of hurt feelings fell off the radar. Perhaps I should get over myself.

Note: I don't much LIKE that hypothesis. Let's move on.

Hypothesis Two: One day, all the employees of this bookstore were in a van heading out to get coffee together and talk obsessively about their favorite local authors who live in Savannah, and I was not paying attention and I CUT THEM OFF in traffic and one of them took a picture of me with her cell phone camera and then took the picture to her FBI agent boyfriend who ran it through some database and I came up because I had to get fingerprinted and SCREENED before I was allowed to work in my church nursery and he sent her the info back and they realized I was a local writer and they said, OKAY WHENEVER SHE COMES IN JUST BE POLITE AND THEN DON'T ORDER HER BOOK. OR ORDER IT IN FRONT OF HER AND THEN IMMEDIATELY CANCEL THE SECOND SHE WALKS OUT. AND THEN WE CAN GO IN THE BACK AND LAUGH AND LAUGH AND THROW MORE DARTS AT HER PICTURE! Because OBVIOUSLY their lives revolve entirely around THE HOPE THAT THEY WILL BE GIVEN THE A CHANCE TO RUIN MY DAY.

Yes, hypothesis 2 seems much more reasonable.

SO in the hopes of fostering peace between me and this cult of book sellers who clearly spend WAY too much time thinking about me, allow me to FORMALLY SAY:

Dear alla ya'll at the bookstore,

I am so sorry I cut you off in traffic. Let's be friends! PLEASE STOCK MY BOOK AND PS I AM LOCAL. I AM SO LOCAL YOU COULD SPIT AND HIT MY HOUSE FROM YOUR JOB, and in fact, you probably do. Please stop, that's gross. Please put me on the local authors shelf! I love you!

XXOOO KISS KISS HEART SPARKLE DIAMOND KISS TWINKLE XXXO,
Joshilyn

I am leaving for England tomorrow and I will be doing quite a bit of drop in stock signings. I am sure to run into book sellers who don't know me from Adam's Housecat, and I am certain to be humbled again but, I have two BIG comforts:

1) There is no London bookseller who can POSSIBLY spit far enough to hit my house and
2) If THEY will make me feel 3 inches tall, they will at least do it using a RAWWWWWWther sexy accent.

Between these comforts and the actual getting of a TRIP TO LONDON, well. Never shall I say this job don't got no perks!

Yelling Hello as I Dash By on the Way to TV in Tuscaloosa

I am back on the road (I took my kids with me. I love summer.), so here is brief update.

1) Maisy is fine. MAISY IS FINE. Everyone has looked at Maisy and thumped Maisy and said STRIDER and nodded wisely and they all agree that she is FINE. SO. I am going to accept that SHE IS FINE. For now. Someday she may even sleep her own room again, allowed to breathe unsupervised. I know my husband would probably like that.HEH!

2) I am fine. I have this weird thing where good things in my life scare me, because I feel I am racking up some monstrously huge karmic debt that can only be paid by losing 3 or 4 of my limbs or being burned up in a fire, and that's just silly. Life doesn't BALANCE like that. No one gets equal and exact scoops of ice cream and dog poo on their plate. LIFE. IS. NOT. FAIR. This is one of those times that I should be HAPPY that life isn't fair, because if it WAS, I would be OWED SO MUCH DOG POO! I would have a dog poo deficit to rival the federal deficit. AND so I have made a new good pure truthful resolution in the deepest pink part of my sincere heart to BE HAPPY WITH MY ICE CREAM and SHUT UP. It is actually going well so far! No fretting at ALL! '

But, you know, it's seven AM, and I instituted this policy 6 AM. So.

3) If you are doing book promotion, and Stephenie at the Huntsville Library invites you to come speak...hear me on this...GO. She did SUCH great event promo that the auditorium was PACKED (very unusual for a first time novelist) and she had 5 cases of books there and sold all but 6 copies. AND??? Gave me Godiva truffles. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Stephenie. Also it was a GREAT engaged fun crowd who asked GREAT questions -- many I had never heard before, and they asked ZERO of the three questions you always hear that have no answer. I had a good time.

4) If you are a person who has put my book on the side of your blog in the WHAT I AM READING or your FAVORITE BOOKS THIS YEAR or your RECOMMENDED READING slot, then you are SO excruciatingly pretty and I wish you would send me the link via e-mail. I DO know of a couple of blogs who have done this that I have found GOOGLING or who DID send me mail, but I have gotten letters from readers who found gods in Alabama on the sides of blogs I have never HEARD OF and I am SO CHARMED BY YOU, YOU SECRETIVE UNKNOWN DARLINGS. Word of mouth (and its internetterly equivalent, which would be...what? Word of blog?) is EVERYTHING with a first book, especially now that the book is a few months old. Thank you anonymous unknown lovely bloggers. You are almost flawless, but you did not SEND ME A LINK so I can THANK YOU and tell you that you are having a GOOD GOOD hair day and that NO, those pants EMPHATICALLY do NOT make you look fat.

Boggle Ye With Me

First a CLARIFICATION: I am not unhappy to have 50,000 rowdy boys churning the air into butter in my basement. We picked our neighborhood because it had a PACK of roving boys playing kickball and etc in the cul de sacs EVERY TIME we drove through, and we picked our house in it because of the basement and the big pondy-froggy-turtle-y lot. Then we set up the downstairs with specific CHILD ATTRACTING equipment. As Sam gets older we will finish out the BIG BASEMENT ROOM and put in a MOVIE THEATRE and get rid of the KIDDIE POOL TABLE and put in a real one (Scott is PANTING to do this right now because he is a SHARK!) And I'll add a downstairs fridge and keep it stocked with cokes and popcorn and ice cream and strawberries and let Sam and Maisy pick the colors and put the old, comfy furniture and not care if it is utterly destroyed or permeated with the smell of adolescent boy feet. Because I want to be THE HOUSE. You know?

It is IMPORTANT to be THE HOUSE. There is ALWAYS a THE HOUSE. When Sam (and later Maisy) is a teenager, if it is 1 AM on a Friday night, and it becomes necessary to ask the question WHERE IS SAM, I want the answer to be, "IN MY BASEMENT WATCHING MOVIES AND SHOOTING POOL AND EATING FREE FOOD WITH A HERD OF HIS FRIENDS." Not, "At some other THE HOUSE, licking investigatively at a big block of heroin and fondling a hooker."

WELCOME BACK TO TRAVEL SANS MERCY!
I have been to, what, like 19 hotels in the last month? And you have ONLY heard about the 2 where I had bad things happen. SO. Let me say, the others were like Barbie's Dream House, all lofted ceilings and flat screen TVs with monstrously good cable and hot and cold running naked oiled cabana boys and crab cake room service and starbucks coffee free in the lobby....VERY nice hotels. NOT the sort of hotel where the bed has a slot for a quarter and if you put one in, the bed jiggles you for ten minutes. More like, the bed had a slot where you could feed it five dollar bills and it would play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata for you. Maybe a little TOO good for a cotton and kudzu backwater rube-chick like me.

And even the bad experiences...they were NICE hotels. One was a very nice hotel, except it had an evil money-sucking exploitative restaurant manager who is going to be SO SORRY when he goes to hell and is thrown into a pile of burning credit cards to smolder eternally in the stink of melting plastic. One hotel was having a genuinely troubled day, what with the SPIDER and the MEAN PERSON and the CONSTRUCTION, but for the record I stayed at that SPIDER MEAN PERSON CONSTRUCTION hotel on the pre-tour and it was PERFECT. So.

I say all this to say: I am at an internet cafe FULL OF TEENAGE BOYS playing WarCraft. It's a pretty cool cafe...it is trying to be THE HOUSE and attract the kids here to avoid the heroin licking/hooker thing. It is NEXT TO and OWNED BY this cute little church, and it has FREE INTERNET,and a stage for BANDS and cheap coffee drinks and cookies and sammies. EVERYONE in here is 17 or under, except me, yet here I sit, listening to my FOURTH SOLID HOUR of contemporary Christian Music as I write this, and...wow. Four hours is a LOT OF CCM. HEH. But I WILL NOT GO NO NEVER NO NEVER because, are you ready for this??? The hotel where I am staying is EVIL.

Oh, it has a BAY VIEW and a DOWN COMFORTER and a HEATED indoor outdoor pool and a four star restauraunt...But...are you ready??? You are not. SIT DOWN and hold hands with someone comforting:
THE HOTEL HAS NO INTERNET CONNECTION.

Pause and boggle with me. NO. INTERNET. CONNECTION. That's right. I cannot get to you from there, nor you to me. IT IS CUT OFF! IT IS SILENT! IT IS A WIREFREE TOMB OF DOOM! I like me some internet in the same way I like me some oxygen...

I got there and the FIRST THING OUT OF MY MOUTH??? As per usual...

Me: How to I connect to the internet? Cable ro wireless?
Hotel Guy: Um, neither!
Me: *boggles at him* HA! HA! NO, BUT REALLY BECAUSE. UM. BUT REALLY WHICH?
Hotel Guy: Well, we have dial up.
Me: HA HA HA. Um What is dial up? THE PHONE THING with the WREEEEEE noise? Because um..*nervous tittering* you are scaring me. No really. HOW DO I CONNECT TO THE INTERNET???
Hotel Guy: You come back in 2006 when the 40 million dollar renovation is over and we have internet.
Me: *boggles*

SO I have spent the day here at Cafe CCM. I LOVE IT HERE. All the kids are looking at me all askance but HERE is good, and I do not MIND that this News Boys CD has played through 4 times now. BECAUSE THIS CAFE HAS YOU, OH MY BELOVED INTERNET! MY LOVELY VIRTUAL FRIENDS! MY POSSUMS, MY BLOSSOMS, OH MY BEST INVISIBLE BELOVEDS. I was SO lonely without you yesterday....But ALAS! My ride is coming to take me to the event, so I must post this and trail sadly away, back to a place with...with...*choked sobbing* NO CONNECTION!!!!!!!!!

Travel. Sans. Mercy.

But I was Mad, Though, Is Why

It wasn't that bad. I speak in the TEENIEST bit of hyperbole sometimes. The spider? He probably really only contained enough spider material to make three good sized garden spiders. Three and a half, tops. And probably the hotel is not so much VERMIN INFESTED as having construction, so that the banging and and the spider showing up in my room were related facets of a single, unavoidable problem. And the fact that some construction workers did not come when they heard a woman POSSIBLY BEING DISMEMBERED can not be blamed on the hotel, because I doubt they hired the construction company by checking to see which one had captured the MOST axe murderes.

As for the door man---it really WAS my fault. I have forgotten how to speak CHICAGO. And HE never had any idea of how to speak GEORGIA. Had I gone up to him and said, directly, "May I please have a ride to the gym," I bet he would have gotten me one. However, I am PHYSICALLY INCAPABLE OF SAYING THAT. Because that, see, would be asking directly for what I wantslashneed. And um, I would sooner eat my own intestines. SO what happened was, I went down and tried to INDICATE, indirectly and politely, that he should probably get a car for me.

What I said: How far is it to the gym? Do I need a ride or can I walk?
What I meant: I need a ride to the gym.
What he heard: How far is it to the gym? Do I need a ride or can I walk?
What he answered: It's only about six blocks. You can walk it easily in under ten minutes.
What I heard him say: I am busy and important.

What I said: Oh but, look! It is raining.
What I meant: I need a ride to the gym.
What he heard: Oh but, look! It is raining.
What he answered: It's not raining hard.
What I heard him say: You are bothering me.

What I said: Is it very cold? I don't have a coat with me, or an umbrella. Everyone out there looks to be in big overcoats.
What I meant: I need a ride to the gym.
What he heard: But I don't have a coat with me, or an umbrella. Everyone out there looks to be in big overcoats.
What he said: Well, I am not sure how cold it is. Probably not too cold. Just go outside and walk a little and see if it is too cold. You can always come back.
What I heard: Please go away. And PS, I hope you get frostbite and die.

And IN GEORGIA that IS what he would have meant. BUT SEE, I was in Chicago. I remember in grad school I had to LEARN TO SPEAK A WHOLE NOTHER LANGUAGE practically, because people would ask me to serve on committees or come to meetings and I would answer with words that seemed to me to be a very clear, NO. Not just NO, but more like, NO NO NO AND NO AND PS THE DEMONS OF SEVENTH LEVEL HELL WILL OPEN LEMONADE STANDS TO COOL THE TONGUES OF THE DAMNED BEFORE THAT COMES TO PASS. But what the CHICAGO-ANS would hear would be, "Yes, please, I would love to." SO. I just forgot.

AND ANYWAY NOW I AM IN VERMONT staying at the VERT BEST HOTEL EVER. It is called 1811 house and you should come stay here. It's a BandB but not RELENTLESSLY FLORAL. It's PRETTY and UNDERSTATED and LOVELY. This is a B and B that the Gilmore Girls WOULD stay at and ENJOY and I think I may just LIVE here.

And tomorrow is NORTHSHIRE (awesome bookstore) and OUTLET SHOPPING with my friend Mir which MAY be either FUN or WAR because it is ALL about shoes, on this we agree, but we may come to blows over the kitten heel v/s the wedge. She is a pointy toe afficionada and I am all about the ankle strap. It could get UGLY.

ALSO! THE WARNER REP is coming and bringing me a NEW ARC of WIDOW OF THE SOUTH and soon I will go home and I have SO MUCH TO READ! OH OH the BOOKS omg. Every place I go I am meeting HANDSELLERS, right? And I am a BIG junkie and now I have books scattered across my house like ORPHANS. Orphans with feet who move themseleves around. The worst sorts of well-fed, roving orphans who seem to move themselves all over my house---Dickens wouldn't have saved a one of them, they NEVER sit still and say PLEASE MAY I HAVE SOME MORE. They WANDER. I wil never find the one I want to read when I want to read it, so. I will have to have THE GREAT BOOK RE-ORG when I get home and...YIKES that will take forever. SO, I won't go home. I will just live here at 1811 house which has CHOCOLATE and an HONOR BAR and NO SPIDERS. Yay.

I Shriek At You and then Run for a Plane

ONE OF THE REPS gave me an ARC for a book I am DYING to read. It is called WIDOW OF THE SOUTH by ROBERT HICKS and it is coming out this fall and, oh my best beloveds, you heard it here first: Hothothot buzz all OVER this book. I LIKE ARCs, I LOVE getting my hands on a book before it is released. It makes me feel DIRTY. But in a good way.

SO I am all BOTHERED to read this ARC but I couldn't because it is SOUTHERN and I don't read southern when I am working and (I am pleased to report) I AM WORKING. My brain is a bag of low-fat popcorn revolving in the microwave oven of my head, poppoppop. I plan to read WIDOW at the end of this month when I take a little 2 week break to work on some SUMMARIES...SO LONG STORY UNBEARABLY LONG... I GOT a copy and I just went to LOOK for it to show my mother who is here to raise my children as I gallivant off to Chicago and Vermont, and I realized I must have promptly LOST it. DERNIT. I was on the road.

WAIT NO! It was in New Orleans!!! I think. I think I may have mailed it to myself, or handed it to the media escort to mail to me! OH MY LORD it is seriously all coming back to me as I type. That's where it is. My LUGGAGE got overweight and somewhere in New Orleans is a media rep who has a BUTTLOAD of my books actually that we kept meaning to ship and we kept being thwarted by post office hours and the not having a box where they would all fit and there are COOKIES in there too I think, COOKIES! I was trying to mail myself these LEMON COOKIES and a SHARP pink purse that Gabi gave me and a PANTSLOAD of books, and we never could get them mailed, and the media escort said, DO NOT WORRY MY LITTLE POODLE, MY DUMPLING, MY BELOVED SHY HERMIT CRAB! FOR I SHALL MAIL THEM TO YOU! MEDIA RATE! BECAUSE I AM THRIFTY, NOW LIE YOUR HEAD UPON MY RAMPANT BOOOOSOMS AND I SHALL PET YOUR HAIR AND SING TO YOU AS WE GO TO THE AIRPORT.

I love media escorts. They pick you up and tote you around and feed you at regular intervals and are usually BOOK people to boot. It's like a WELL-READ NANNY for grown-ups. I want one for my house.

FAVORITE SAM STORY OF WHILE I WAS ON THE ROAD:

Sam: I think we're going to add another baby when Maisy is five.
My Mother: Oh? Really?
Sam: Yes. That's only two years away, so we better get ready.
My Mother: Why do you think you guys will be adding another baby? Did your mom and dad say something?
Sam: I think mom wants some more people around here. You know, to help with the chores.

ADDENDUM: FOUND THE BOX! The media rep DID ship it. My husband PUT IT IN A SPECIAL PLACE because I was on the road. WIDOW OF THE SOUTH NOT IN IT. Distraught. I was SO sure that was where it was. Taking WHITE TEETH to read on the plane, anyway, but. Where is that BOOK????

How to Get Chips

1) REALLY want chips. YEARN for chips. Desire chips not just for CHIPS sake, but because you are very hungry, and it is late at night, and you are BACK in Memphis at the MONEYSUCK hotel and you REFUSE to order room service. You would sooner be eaten by zombie monkeys. Slowly. SO. YOU NEED CHIPS.

2) Follow signs to ICE AND VENDING. Find Ice and a coke machine and another sign that says, "CHIPS are located on the third floor in the guest laundry."

3) Go to third floor.

3) Find no chips.

4) Find no guest laundry, even. Instead, find MORE ICE and a coke machine and a sign that says "CHIPS are located on the third floor in the guest laundry."

5) Pop your head of of ICE AND VENDING and look at all the room numbers that say 324, 325, 326, etc but no signs for guest laundry.

6) Wander the third floor like an aimless ghost, wailing about chips.

7) Did I mention you are in your pajamas? Well. You are. You have decided that since you have put on sandals and a bra and since your pajamas are actually a VERY soft pair of Moroccan pants your friend Amy gave you and a 9 year old pilled knit maternity top (SSSSSSSEXY!) it's okay. See, you got locked out of your room once before in modest but VERY OBVIOUSLY PAJAMA pajamas, so on THIS leg you took non-pajama looking sleepies. Assessing your sleepwear in the mirror, PRE-chip-hunt, you concluded rightly that most people would think "escaped mental patient" before they would think, "ah! pajamas!" and since it is VERY late and you are VERY hungry and you aren't GOING ANYWHERE really except right down the hall from your room to vending, you thought to yourself, "HEY! Why CHANGE?" Except now the OBVIOUS answer is, "Because you are going to have to go to the lobby."

6) Go to the lobby. In your pajamas. Have nice human explain that there are TWO third floors. A north tower one and a south tower one. You have been wandering the halls of the NORTH tower one....guess where the chips are.

7) Go to SOUTH tower third floor. Follow signs to guest floor laundry where person-who-is-unhappier-than-you is doing his laundry. God bless him. He is doing laundry in the dark of night in a hotel far from home. He is probably unhappier than EYEORE.

8) SEE! CHIP! MACHINE! Do a small internal prance (VERY internal because it is untoward to prance gleefully by someone who is RADIATING I-am-unhappier-than-eyeore vibes).

9) Put dollar in slot. Watch machine placidly put dollar RIGHT back out.

10) Repeat step nine about eleven times.

11) Notice that the repetition has attracted Eyeore, who watches with sad yet unsurprised eyes.

12) Bang head on chip machine, and as you do, notice a FLASHING RED SIGN just above the placid dollar-spitting slot that says CHANGE ONLY.

13) GO BACK to lobby in pajamas and get CHANGE for your dollar.

14) BACK to guest laundry. Eyeore watches your approach with something akin to hope. You suspect Eyeore is rooting for the chip machine.

15) Start to not like Eyeore. Lift your chin and decide NOT to be defeated. Walk to machine, undefeated, put in change, undefeated, and undefeatedly press button for chips.

16) Be defeated.

17) GO BACK TO THE LOBBY and get ONE of your quarters swapped out for two dimes and a nickel.

18) BACK TO LAUNDRY. Eyeore says, "I do not think that will help. I tried it earlier with all dimes and I could not get it to work either..."

19) STRONGLY consider murder.

20) Decide against it and put EXACT change in, hold breath, say teeny prayer and watch in mounting joy and disbelief as the CHIPS SLIDE TOWARD YOU and by some MIRACLE do NOT catch on the edge of the wheelie thing and hang there paid for but ungettable thus necessitating Ben Stiller type antics where you try to WORM up into the machine and get them and then failing that you ROCK it back and forth in a moronic frothing rage, a course of action that can only lead to you dead under a chip machine with Eyeore standing over your corpse saying something PITHY, but instead chips FALL into the slot and are YOURSYOURSYOURS.

21) CONTROL impulse to victory dance because you are NOT dancing for Eyeore in your pajamas. Chips or no Chips.

22) Clutching chips, run to elevator and head up to the tenth floor, and then stand outside your room for a long time putting key card in and getting a red light before you realize....your room is actually on the SOUTH tower's tenth floor, and you are currently assaulting a door in the NORTH tower.

23) Creep away before whoever is crouched inside the room terrorized by your predations can call the cops, and go BACK down to lobby (The pajamas at this time are beginning to think of themselves as LOUNGE WEAR) and then back up the OTHER tower where a merciful God lets you back into your room to fall asleep in front of Law of Order before you even get the chip bag open, but it doesn't MATTER because you WON, you WON CHIPS, you defeated Eyeore and, more importantly, you defeated ROOM SERVICE, and you sleep the beautiful sleep of the just.

A Big Old-Fashioned Temper Tantrum

BUT... some linky love before I have it...The GCC is touring me this month!
New interview up at Karin Gillespie's blog ---SHE ASKS GOOD QUESTIONS.

Another interview, this one with known smarty-pants and poet Gayle Brandeis.
Lastly, a review (and the press release) by Megan Crane, who BOUGHT THE BOOK and who is SO pretty. Also she REALLY LIKED it, which makes her EVEN EVEN PRETIER. We heart Megan Crane.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled temper tantrum...
I AM MAD!

I am mad at the hotel that I stayed at in Memphis. I think it is a 12 story moneysucking BUTT.

I got back after the signing at about....8 and noticed there was NOTHING around the hotel but banky-looking offices. NO places to eat or get food. Just one LUNCH place that closed at 2. OOPS. So. I looked at the room service menu because I had been ON all day and I wanted to sit AWAY from people and have a glass of wine and some meat in peace. Just me and my beautiful friend the TV talking unhearable nonsense at me while I finished reading Kate Atkinson's ASTOUNDINGLY GREAT NEW BRILLIANT AMAZING PERFECT NOVEL (Case Histories) and wore p