Left Isis
Right Isis
             

September 23rd, 2007

I’m leaving for Bouchercon in Anchorage this Wednesday at 6:10 in the blinking a.m. This reminds me of when I was a little girl, and my parents would roust us out of bed at 4:00 a.m. for family vacations. My dad liked to get on the road by six. When I was eight, it was all exciting to get up so early. I am not eight any more, and the most that can be said about it is that I’ll probably be in too much of a fog to remember later how awful it was to get up at that hour.

That said, I am all excited about going to Bouchercon, one of the premier mystery conferences in the nation. I’m going to be moderating a panel on historical mysteries on Friday. My fellow panelists are Ken Kuhlken, Robert McCammon, Clare Langley-Hawthorne, and Sharon Rowse. I’m also slated to do a solo thirty minute meet and greet on Saturday. Apparently they sit authors in a little room all alone and allow them to do whatever they want for anyone who wanders in. Dana Stabenow, the self-styled “Panel Tzarina”, said the room will seat a maximum of fifty people. I told her I didn’t think all fifty of my fans would be there, but I was more than happy to entertain whoever shows up.

I mentioned in the last post that I’m doing the official launch of Drop Edge of Yonder on Oct. 8 at Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, AZ. At the end of that very week, on Oct. 13 at 5:00, I’ll be doing a charity event with Ken Kuhlken at Pyle Adult Center in Tempe. Then I’m off to Colorado. I’ll be at a conference for Western women writers in Colorado Springs on the weekend of the 19th, then I’m doing a gig at a Barnes and Noble there on the 25th. Finally I’ll be doing a program with California author Mara Purl at Tattered Cover in Denver on Oct. 26th at 7:30. And that’s October.

Don and I both have sisters in the Colorado Springs/Denver area. We’ve been threatening to go up and visit both of them for many years, and now it looks like we’re finally going to make good on our threat. That’ll teach them to keep asking us to come.

I don’t function very happily under pressure, so I’ve been packing in a leisurely manner for the last week, and believe it or not I’ve been able to get a lot of writing done at the same time. Part of my motivation may be the fact that I know that the month of October is pretty much a wash as far as available writing time. A very famous writer told me that I was “on the merry-go-round”, which is just what it feels like to try to put out a book a year. The minute one gets finished, you have to start on the next, and by the time book one is in print, it’s time to turn in book two, promote book one, and start on book three!

Over on the Type M 4 Murder blog (www.typem4murder.com), the five participating authors – including Yours Truly – have been writing about their feelings of and experiences with promotion. It’s pretty interesting to see how everybody handles (and justifies) what they do to push their books.

And finally, a most happy birthday to my very own sister, Martha, who I will be seeing in Denver in just a few weeks. Martha used to be several years younger than I am.

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