This time last year, I was leaving for a term of living and teaching in Paris. Now I'm preparing for a month of traveling for the book. My tour is self-designed, based on where my friends are. This isn't strategic thinking exactly but works out well enough. Big cities are New York and San Francisco, and in between, we have Austin, Dallas, Houston, Albuquerque, and in Vermont two stops--in Manchester and Burlington.
The tour includes all the settings for THE MOTHER WHO STAYED. I don't feel sentimental about Albuquerque, just comfortable with the little I know of it. But Washington County, New York, and New York City are emotionally dense for me and I look forward to being there again.
This time of year feels more like a holding pattern than a beginning. In Austin, the skies are gray. It's wet without raining, and cool. But perhaps I'm projecting my own sense of waiting for the pub date and the traveling to begin onto the weather.
My feelings about travel are always the same duo of excitement and fear. No different this time but mixed with the same duo about the publication of my story collection.
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