Back From the Book Tour

I arrived home around 1:30pm yesterday and the house was still standing. I was unsurprised; these days the fam' can get along very well without me, which increases the pleasure I feel in my rare escapes considerably. The soup I made before leaving had been eaten, the pets had been fed, and medicines were administered at appropriate hours. And our youngest went to bed uncharacteristically early both nights, which made me jealous, but happy for my wife.

All this made it easy to blab on about how much fun I had on my adventure to Eugene and North Bend. Audiences were receptive, attentive and purchased books with applomb, the advance publicity was good, fellow authors Jill Kelly, Linda Zuckerman and K. B. Dixon were brilliant and sociable, and the tour was run like clockwork. Bless you Susan Denning of Literary Arts/Oregon Book Awards, Gary Sharp of the North Bend Public Library and Cecelia Hagen of the Lane Literary Guild, which co-sponsored the Eugene leg of the tour with The Eugene Public Library.

On a more eclectic note, I accomplished my goal of listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on tape for almost the entire driving time (one brief section of forest between Drain and Cool Bay was dedicated to hearing the Twilight soundtrack twice), reading two books on writing YA fiction, reading Kissing Kate by Lauren Myracle, and swallowing 2/3 of the third mystery novel by Oregon writer Morgan Hunt, Blinded By the Light, which I will be praising to high heaven on this blog as soon as I finish. I also saw one bald eagle, numerous hawks, one vulture, a herd of elk, a white crane, several cats, and a blue heron--alive. Among the dead along the way were cats, dogs, deer, raccoons, possum, and hawks. I've never seen so many raptors along the road, nor have I seen so many domestic cats hunting prey along the highway. I wonder what that says about our rodent population.

Frugality kept me from eating as irresponsibly as I could have, but I had my share of Diet Cokes (and then some) and a DQ cone as soon as hitting town in Eugene. Coincidentally, I hit Eugene on the way home for coffee, because there doesn't seem to be a Starbucks between North Bend and Eugene, and I craved reliably good coffee. I now know Eugene a lot better, so that when we do the college tour thing with our oldest son this spring, I can steer us in the right direction.

Can't wait for the next tour.