photos

merry & bright in new york

Spent the beginning of the week in NYC, having lunches and meetings and wandering around looking at twinkly lights. Part pseudo-business trip, part getting out of my apartment for a little while. My train down was subjected to zombie shenanigans, though Amtrak claimed it was “tree branches” knocking out “power” on the tracks. Got to New York about five hours late and had to change a lunch to a next-day breakfast but other than that everything was lovely. My first trip to Manhattan in about five years was almost a year ago, just post-holiday rather than pre-holiday though everything was still twinkly-lit. That was the first time I’d met my agent and my editor and September and real book things still felt very far off. What a difference almost a year makes.

Back in Boston now, trying desperately to manage the pre-holiday to-do list and wondering why all the blog comments from the last two weeks seem to have disappeared. Hrm. I shall try to tackle that mystery at some point, in between everything else on the list. In the meantime, here are some festive photos from New York.

 

By erin, ago

how it ends.

I am done with touring for 2011.

I don’t think Thank You is enough for all the wonderful bookstores and booksellers, for all the readers (whether they’d read The Night Circus yet or not) who came to events and for everyone who organized so many festivals and signings and interviews and flights, but Thank You.

I am slowly re-acclimating to my normal time zone, which has involved sleeping a lot. I am also trying to catch up on things around here that have been neglected during the tour, like cleaning and unpacking things that somehow never managed to get unpacked over the summer.

I uploaded my photos from foggy Amsterdam:

 

More photos (and more fog!) over on my Flickr photostream.

It’s strange to be done, at least with the travelling. I have things to catch up on (if I owe you an email I’ll get to it soon(ish), hopefully) and the to-do list still seems never-ending and despite all that I know I need some rest. I am not used to so many things and people requiring my attention and I am still adjusting. Also, I’d like to be able to write again at some point.

It is an open-windows, reading in the park sort of day which is rare for this late in November. It’s lovely but not helping me regain my concept of time.

On the flight over to Amsterdam one of the in-flight movie options on the individual embedded in the seat in front of you televisions was Midnight in Paris. I had been told by several people that I would love it and they were correct, it is a marvelous magical fairy tale of a film and I loved it more than I have loved any new film in recent memory. And I’m not even much of a Woody Allen fan.

On the flight back to Boston I half-slept with DeVotchKa’s How it Ends on repeat. So I suppose that makes this the song of the end of the book tour:

By erin, ago

my weekend, with photos

On Saturday morning I left Toronto after a splendid time at the International Festival of Authors, headed to NYC. I was supposed to arrive around 1pm, but then this happened:

This was taken in the Hartford, Connecticut airport after my plane circled and circled and then tried to land in NY and then couldn’t and then landed in Hartford instead. After an hour of looking at the snow they announced that the flight was rescheduled for the next morning. Which, boo. So I took a cab for a very snowy drive to New Haven to catch a train, and the train was going fine until it was no longer going at all, stopped for two hours and then there were more trains and more cabs and I got snowed on and tired and finally got to my hotel just before midnight.

I have lived in New England my entire life and I don’t ever remember a snowstorm like this in October. It is so strange, the autumn-colored trees drenched in winter-white snow. Like a collision of the seasons.

Yesterday I spent a lovely day in NYC, I was there mostly to go to Sleep No More for their Hallowe’en week festivities, in particular for Aphrodite’s Revenge, with an enforced “red & sexy” dress code. Had to get a slinky red dress because for some unknown reason I did not actually own a slinky red dress but now I do and I am sure I will find more opportunities to wear it in the future.

I also did not have the best hotel room for taking photos of said dress, though it was a lovely room.

Sleep No More was, as always, dreamlike and haunting and wondrous. It was my eighth visit, with extra festivities afterward and a wonderful Hallowe’en treat, especially considering I’m spending Hallowe’en proper exhaustedly back in Boston with cupcakes. But one of the cupcakes has a spider on it!

Or did, rather, he’s been eaten. He was tasty.

I am working on getting my tour photos organized so there will be much belated updates at some point. For now I wish you all a Happy Hallowe’en, a Blessed Samhain and a Merry NaNoWriMo Eve!

By erin, ago

this is not a proper post

This is not a proper catch-up post, because that would have thoughtful things and links and artfully curated photos.

This is a post to say miscellaneous things with miscellaneous photos and possibly links if I have time.

Firstly, I am very sorry that my appearance at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville this weekend was cancelled at the last minute. This whole touring thing is extremely difficult and new and I am only one often undercaffeinated person. There were personal issues involved that the whole internet doesn’t really need to know about but I do feel badly and I hope I’ll be able to visit the Nashville area properly sooner rather than later.

I had my very first trip to the UK last week, there will be a proper adventure recounting post at some point with photos (took the real camera, hurrah) but I had an absolutely lovely time and I get to follow through on that whole “hope to come back soon” thing since I’ll be back in November for the Galaxy National Book Awards because I am nominated for International Author of the Year amongst some mind-blowingly impressive company. Am honored and humbled.

In general, I am mostly a whirlwind of forgetting what time or day or month it is and assuming it must be autumn because of crispy leaves and pumpkin spice lattes. I am off to Texas soon and then Toronto for the International Festival of Authors at the end of the month. It is still strange to be considered an author. My apartment looks like an explosion of laundry and cardboard boxes. I am dreadfully behind on emails and anything else that involves proper communication. I have been on more airplanes in the last month than in the rest of my previous life combined. I oscillate from giddy to exhausted and happy to sad so fast it’s nauseating.

I don’t know how to do this. I’m trying to take one day at a time.

Half the time I can’t even manage to straighten my hair anymore. Proof:

 

I took that photo sitting on the floor because that’s where the mirror is in the office because I haven’t managed to hang it yet.

Really, let’s move on to photos before I get all philosophical and maudlin with the typing.

I have visited so many beautiful bookstores on my tour with very little (if any) time for proper browsing, it’s such a tease. But when I do have time I’ve been shopping and having things shipped to me, so I am accumulating a pile. This is what has made it back to Boston so far, with more on the way:

(I have already read The Shadow of the Wind, of course, but I only had it in paperback and I found it at Lemuria Books in Jackson, Mississippi in glorious hardcover and simply had to have it. And there are some other ones that have wandered out of the pile. Bel Canto is missing, likely because I’ve been reading it.)

And at Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee I also bought this adorable raven mug, because how could I not?

So that is the rather short version of Erinland at the moment. I hope I will have time for proper London photos and tour catch-up at some point, but it may be a while.

By erin, ago

mississippi

True confession: I sing the spelling of Mississippi to myself every time I type it.

I had never been to Mississippi before and I was fortunate enough to have wonderful weather for my visit, I wish I could conduct all of my phone interviews from porch swings.

Had a splendid, open windowed reading at Square Books, which featured the book tour’s first bookstore kitty:

And then I had a long winding road trip from Oxford to Jackson, with a stop in Greenwood to sign stock at the lovely Turnrow Book Co. Then in Jackson I signed quite a few books at Lemuria Books before my fantastically circusy event. I tweeted the view from the podium and this is from the back of the room:

I tried to convince them to just leave the ceiling like that. And my blurry phone camera photos will not do all their exquisite circus signage justice:

Had a fantastic time and huge thanks to everyone who came out for events and worked so hard to put them together!

In Milwaukee now, clinging to my room service coffee before I get rolling on a day full of interviews and things.

By erin, ago

tour catch-up post that is mostly odd photos

Hi Internet! I have been away and off and about and becoming far too intimately acquainted with airports.

I have had good intentions of blogging along the way but then my connectivity gets cranky and sleep seems so much more practical than blogging and then a week goes by, not sure how that happens.

A housekeeping note: am in the process of trying to overhaul the site a bit, giving news & reviews their own blogfeed rather than putting them all on this one. Still working on the best way to accomplish that.

I have been all over the place and I am not sure I can do a proper recounting of my adventures, so I will rely on the bits I managed to capture on my phone camera, which as you may know, takes better photos retro-cam style than it does normally.

One of my favorite bits from Odyssey Books in South Hadley, MA, their very own Wishing Tree:

And this has nothing to do with anything (well, directly) but I couldn’t not capture this bit of found Shakespeare in Salem:

Llamas in Baltimore, from the very quick trip I took to the Baltimore Book Festival. (The Peabody Library is astoundingly beautiful, by the way.) I am not sure if they are drama llamas, but they probably are. I suspect most llamas have drama.

This week I spent several days in Toronto on the first of my international stops, got to break in my brand new passport. Everyone at Random House Canada was wonderful and I ate so much good food that I forgive them for putting me on tv. A lot. They had a lovely cocktail reception with cotton candy and tarot reading and magic, I signed books in bookstores and tried to wrap my head around being the kind of person who gets talked to on tv shows and failed, it was all very strange. I get to go back next month for the International Festival of Authors so I am very much looking forward to the return visit, I’ve been promised I will have more time for city exploring.

Geese in Toronto:

View from my hotel room in Toronto:

Home now for just over a day before the busiest leg of the tour begins. Next time I’ll be back in Boston it’ll be for a matter of hours before leaving for London. So far have spent my day off doing laundry and shopping for new dresses to add to the tour wardrobe rotation.

Also, in between Baltimore and Toronto I briefly stopped in NYC to hug all my Doubleday lovelies, and they gave me the stunning original paper art from the cover! It has been shipped to me, proper photos once I actually have it but it is truly lovely and it was such a sweet & thoughtful present. I am a very lucky girl to have found myself such a wonderful publishing family. They’re all cute, too, I’m just sayin’.

There were also beautiful cookies and cupcakes and I got edible roses that I can’t bear to eat:

Also, I cannot quite believe that tomorrow is October already.

By erin, ago