A box of books arrived yesterday: Christmas in October. There are two Justina Chen Headleys—Girl Overboard and North of Beautiful (an ARC). There are three Catherine Gilbert Murdocks: Dairy Queen, The Off Season, Princess Ben. There is a note from my friends at HarperCollins: For ALAN, which is shorthand for, Hey, aren't you lucky, this is the work of your co-panelists for the upcoming ALAN conference in San Antonio. (Matt de la Pena will be joining us for this Sports Stories = Life Stories panel as well; I'll be getting his books soon.)
The answer is, Yes, I am so lucky. I rarely travel in my book life—rarely pretend that I do much more than run my business, clean my house, write this blog, chill with friends, text with my boy, stand helpless in the produce aisles attempting to dream up (yet another) dinner, watch Project Runway and DWTS with my happily agreeable husband, dance a sambarumbafoxtrotchachaandsomehorrifyingmixCDofeach, and (on good days) surreptitiously scribble in the dark. The Traveling Writer's Life has eluded me, or perhaps I have eluded it, but this November I am off to San Antonio to sit on a panel with writers with whom I am so genuinely looking forward to thinking out loud, if only for a short while. It's one of those bright collisional possibilities that could shape a point of view or thread a question through, and frankly, I'm in need of a little shattering of self, a little new.
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The morning has been broken wide by sun. The trees that hadn't bloomed before I left for Appleton are shockingly alive; everything is color. I'm hopping a train for Philadelphia in a few hours and walking, then, to the Philadelphia Book Festival, to see a few friends and to have the honor of reading with Catherine Murdock and Rita Williams-Garcia.
