I read things out aloud in Vancouver. I will also read things out aloud in San Francisco and LA.

There's this kind of electronic day dream that I know I fall victim to, where I switch between twitter, facebook and reddit or something else, continuously, eating the world in tiny bite sized chunks of information and if you are in that kind of electronic day dream now, here are the important things, you can then return to the vicious cycle of gifs, updates, pictures and dramatic news:

1.

The reading in Vancouver went very well and I met a bunch of people on the other side of this screen, briefly, but there was enough time to sit down and talk about what different things meant to each of us, and that felt good to me.

2.

The venues and dates for the San Francisco and LA readings have been confirmed and you can indicate your willingness to join me at those readings on facebook. 

If you hate facebook, here are those details.

Sunday September 14 -- 11am-3pm
Barnes & Noble, Hillsdale
Hillsdale Shopping Center
11 West Hillsdale Blvd
San Mateo, CA

Friday October 10 - 7pm until they throw us out
Bookstar, Barnes & Noble Book Sellers
12136 Ventura Blvd
Studio City
Los Angeles, CA

3.

Tomorrow (roughly 23 hours or so from now), I will be doing a reddit.com/r/iama where you'll be able to ask me questions and I will have to answer them.

4.

There are incredibly limited number of singed copies of I Wrote This For You available from my publisher, you can email her at michelle at centralavenuepublishing dot com.

__

You may now return to the previously mentioned vicious cycle, waiting slowly for the next interesting thing to happen.

If on the other hand, you have some time, here's some more things that have fallen out of my head.

I've been traveling from Vancouver, slowly, down what I consider the sensual neck of America, towards Southern California. If I could freeze the light falling down on the old cars scattered across the farmland we passed and bottle it, I would keep it to myself. Pictures never do a place justice. No one ever parked their cars on the side of a lake and set out a picnic to look at pictures of fireworks. There are fireworks in the giant Redwood forests, explosions of green and brown, all happening in slow motion, over hundreds and thousands of years, and they make me feel so small and so big at the same time.

I hate to say it, and never use this as an excuse not to travel, but I understand why you wouldn't travel - there are different worlds here, hidden in small towns and under benches in big cities (Although the chain stores do start to make the different cities look like everyone's playing Sim City and everyone has the same building blocks, just in a different order).

Let me talk about Vancouver.

I met Michelle, our publisher, for the first time. She's wonderful and kind and everything else the years of working together with her have suggested she is. We met at a Tim Hortons the day we were leaving Vancouver, on the side of a freeway, and we sat down amongst truckers and people on their way to work and I signed a whole bunch of books, very quickly. Someone out there will get my real signature, not my author signature, because I was signing things so quickly I wasn't thinking. The real one is just a circle. The author one kind of looks like my name.

The people at Y's Book Shop in Vancouver were amazing, both the people listening to me read and the people who own the store. It stopped being a reading at some point and just started being a giant conversation. Every reading I've ever done has been different and I love that. This was really intimate and relaxed and real.

Someone asked me who I'd love to listen to, if I can hear them read, I said:

David Foster Wallace
Kurt Vonnegut
Joey Comeau
Walt Witman
Charles Bukowski


After thinking about it, I'd also add:

Pablo Neruda
Richard Siken

Only two of these people are alive. I explained that the problem with writers is that quite often, we want to fight each other, physically, because we don't believe that anyone else can do what we do, or that they've paid whatever we paid to be able to do it and it's only after they're dead that we can really admire each other, because we no longer pose a threat. I went on to explain that if Shakespear had a blog today, his sales would probably be better.

Someone asked me what the most useful emotion was, I said:

Sadness is the most productive emotion but happiness and contentment is where you find the best work.

I said a lot more than that but now I have the luxury of writing things down and making myself sound far more perfect than I ever really am. I also want to have to something to talk about when I'm in front of people later this month.

If you'd like to hear me in all my un-retouched glory, without the benefit of a delete key, I hope I see you in San Francisco or LA, and we can tell each other about the different things that make us feel afraid, or alive.

Thank you, we'll speak soon,

Me