erin

This is the aforementioned fantastic pumpkin that I did not yet have a photograph of when it was mentioned afore, and now I do and you can see what a fantastic pumpkin it is. Also pictured are some pumpkiny friends and a very melty beeswax candle.

The fantastic pumpkin may possibly become a jack-o-lantern but might stay intact and pumpkiny instead.

Partially because the pumpkin will be alone (well, alone with pumpkin friends) for Hallowe’en because I shall be in London. And an unlit jack-o-lantern on Hallowe’en is sad. But my October 31st shall be spent far away from this particular pumpkin reading/conversing/looking fabulous with Audrey Niffenegger at The Prince Charles Cinema. If you are in the London area you should come and wear something dark and decadent and we shall endeavor to be moodily entertaining. I still need to figure out what to wear.

After I get back on this side of the pond I will be heading to Minnesota for Talking Volumes in St Paul on November 9th. You can get tickets on Ticketmaster and I find the fact that you can get tickets for anything involving me on Ticketmaster is strange, though it should be unlike most of my own personal Ticketmaster experiences of refreshing like mad in order to procure tickets to Tori Amos or Florence + the Machine. Perhaps it only works like that for redheads. (Edited to add: I am told you can avoid Ticketmaster entirely and get tickets directly from the Fitzgerald Theater by phone or in person. Remember phones?)

And post-Minnesota I am heading to Toronto for a Read for the Cure event with Vincent Lam and Audrey Niffenegger on November 13th. (I think this season shall live in my memory as the autumn I spent with Audrey Niffenegger.)

And after that I think I am done with airplanes for 2012 which will make me very happy. Also I should be able to hibernate this winter and write a novel, which will be splendid, because the not-yet-novel-shaped thing in my brain badly wants attention. There’s a zombie analogy here I’m not finding, but you probably know what I mean.

I keep unintentionally neglecting the blog because I have been a whirlwind of travel lately and spent most of last week not knowing what time it was.

I went to Naperville, Illinois for a fantastic bookstore event, and then spent a day running around various nearby Illinois locations for Fox Valley Reads which was a wonderful community reading event and I had a lot of fun babbling about all things circusy.

So I was near Chicago but not actually in Chicago. I don’t think I can fairly say I’ve been to Chicago, and I very much want to go back to visit properly. I wanted to see that giant shiny coffee bean-looking thing.

But while I was not in Chicago there was a Miraculous Event!

If you have been reading the blog for a long while or a little while or at all, you have probably noticed that I write teeny stories called flax-golden tales and that I write them based on fantastical photographs by Carey Farrell.

Carey and I have known each other through the wonderment that is the internet for over a decade, but we had never ever met in person before last week outside Chicago.

Proof! We are both real people! With glasses!

Of course, she could have been a book-induced hallucination that manifested in photographic form, but I think she’s probably a real person and a lovely one at that and I am delighted that she is both real and my friend.

From not-Chicago I headed to actual Portland, Oregon, a city I had long thought mythical and I’m still convinced it might be, since during my two days there I sat in at least three different shiny red vinyl armchairs and also had dinner with Katherine Dunn. Not at the same time. I was in the mythical Land of Port for the Wordstock festival which was very fun and somewhere they now have quite a few photos of me draped across one of the aforementioned shiny red chairs.

Then I was back in Boston for a little over 24 hours including a field trip to New Hampshire to procure a rather fantastic pumpkin (I will take a picture of it when I get home) because it is October, after all, though now the pumpkin is patiently waiting to become a jack-o-lantern while I am in New York for a few days for reasons various and sundry.

This weekend I will be back in Boston for a bit and then off to London for a dark and decadent Hallowe’en evening with Audrey Niffenegger at The Prince Charles Cinema.

And then it will be November. Strange how that happens.

For now I am going to have a cappuccino and run off to enjoy the beautiful fall weather in Manhattan while it’s still here.