Ten days on tour for
THE LAST DAYS OF KRYPTON, and that wraps up my three months
of traveling. I wish I'd been able to recover completely from my
Australian cold, but the show must go on. I started in Denver,
then Salt Lake City/Provo, then Reno (to be guest speaker at the
National School Librarians Conference), then Phoenix, Madison,
Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis. One fan came all the way from
Toronto to Chicago for the signing and fortunately we were able
to spend most of the day together, running around to many
bookstores before the official evening signing. In Provo I met
with a lot of fans and writer friends. In Madison I met with Tor
editor Jim Frenkel for lunch and met my Aunt Kathy and Uncle
Mike (webmaster of the wordfire.com and dunenovels.com sites)
for a pizza dinner, as well as my first bosses (at the Cactus
Cafe), Larry and Shirley Gilbert.
Every day, my basic routine was to get up at 6 AM, get to the
airport, fly somewhere, land at around 11:00 AM, get my luggage,
meet the driver/escort, grab lunch (usually a Subway sandwich or
something equally fast), go around to 8-13 bookstores to do
drop-by signings, meet the managers, autograph their copies of
KRYPTON, SANDWORMS OF DUNE, Seven Suns books, Star Wars books,
and "Dune" books. I'd get to my hotel at about 4, check e-mail,
take a shower, change clothes, get picked up at 6 for my 7 PM
signing, go out to dinner afterward at around 8:30, return to
the hotel room again by about 10 and go to sleep, then get up
the next morning and start it all over again.
And throughout all this I was doing a full-fledged rewrite on
my 750-page final Seven Suns novel.
Now, after doing publicity and signings for my books since
the end of July, I am back home again and have quickly recovered
from the lingering effects of the cold. I was pleased to see so
many fans, some dressed as Star Wars characters, others eager to
get their copies of SANDWORMS signed because they had missed the
main tour with Brian and myself. I have now delivered the final
manuscript to THE ASHES OF WORLDS, so I can be satisfied
that the whole "Saga of Seven Suns" is complete, and I'll soon
start the full-blown world building and outlining for
TERRA INCOGNITA. In the meantime, I am editing the
third-draft manuscript for PAUL OF DUNE and will be
spending a few days with Brian in early December to go over
revisions.
Believe it or not, that's a far more relaxed schedule than
I've had for a very long time.
--
KJA
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