A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books, SF

June 13th, 2006

A sizeable crowd came to my reading at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books tonight. They had some particularly good questions. Martha, my literary escort, counted 83 people in the audience. It’s so wild being on a book tour with a big publisher. I’ve published books for years with small presses, and either they didn’t send me on a tour at all, or they sent me on a tour that I had to partially fund myself. And of course I’d be on my own, renting cars, finding bookstores, staying in peoples’ houses.

But with Houghton Mifflin, they have a literary escort in each city who ferries me around to things. Plus they’re putting me in really nice hotels. Here I am having my room service dinner after my reading tonight.

Earlier today I went by the Cartoon Art Museum to see the No Straight Lines exhibit. It was very cool seeing peoples’ actual original artwork. Here I am looking at a piece by Jen Camper.