It’s Wednesday—at least I think it’s Wednesday.  After almost a full month of frenetic activity of working seven days a week, it’s not easy to tell one day from another.  This morning I get to be home in my living room in Tucson.  It’ll be in the nineties by this weekend, but at the moment we’re sitting in the living room enjoying the warmth of our newly installed gas log fireplace.  Bella is snuggled up against the arm of the leather sofa on the far side of the coffee table.  Jojo is playing her version of “flat dog” in front of the fireplace.

Bill has dialed up a Pandora channel that’s playing all those old country/western favorites—Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Gentleman Jim Reeves, Marty Robbins, Roger Miller, and Loretta Lynn.  By the way, the latter is in her eighties now, and I read an article about her this past week.  She evidently stood by her man all right, and it certainly wasn’t easy. And mixed in with all the sad songs about broken hearts and lost loves are some of my favorite old hymns—Amazing Grace is playing right now and The Old Rugged Cross dropped in a few minutes ago.

In other words, I know the words to all the songs.  As a consequence, this is the kind of music I can’t listen to when I’m writing because the words in the songs get in the way of the words my characters need to be saying to each other.

So yes, right this minute I’m not writing.  The corrections on the manuscript to the new Joanna Brady novel, Downfall—due out in September—went to my editor in New York last Friday.  Working on corrections while being on tour is always problematic.  I’m thrilled to tell you that I managed to deliver the manuscript before the end of the first part of the tour.  When the manuscript went out there were only three Clawback events remaining.   In other words, I beat the clock but only just barely.  Then, late yesterday evening, I finished the corrections on the upcoming Joanna/Ali combo novella, Random Acts.  That went to New York over night.  Later this week I have another interview—this one for the upcoming book festival in Kentucky.  Oh, and this week I’m also supposed to have a conference call with my HarperCollins publicist to discuss the book tour in September and a chat with my Simon and Schuster editor about the next Ali book.  Whew!!!

For today, however, I have only two task assignments—write the blog and tackle the mountain of book mark requests piled on the dining room table right behind me.  You may have visions of a secretarial pool handling those.  Nope.  I do them myself.  I open the envelopes, check to see that the addresses involved are in the database, personalize and sign each book mark, and seal the SASEs.  Boy do I appreciate envelopes that come with peel-away sealing strips!

And why do I do that work myself?  Because, just like answering my own e-mails, signing and sending the bookmarks is an important part of my job.

When I first started in the book business, my initial sales rep was Holly Turner.  Holly called on book distributors all over the Pacific Northwest.  Her customers were the people who made sure paperbacks ended up on the shelves in airports, drugstore, and grocery stores.  Holly was an unrepentant hippie who traveled her territory accompanied by her Scottish terrier.  I believe his name was McTavish, but I could be wrong about that.  Was Holly glamorous?  Not at all.  The tops of her knee-highs hardly ever made it to the bottom of her skirts, but she knew the territory, she knew the people, and she was good at her job.

Early on, she gave my career a big boost by making sure I attended  early morning truck driver meetings at Adams News.  The warehouse was located on Elliott, on the far side of the railroad track.  If you didn’t get to the warehouse before the 6:55 freight train came through, you didn’t make the meeting.

“Here’s the deal,” Holly told me.  “Come to the drivers’ meeting.  You wear a skirt, heels, and hose.  I’ll bring the doughnuts, and you’ll be surprised.  All of a sudden your books will be at eye level in the grocery stores.”  Her prediction proved to be true.

I heard later on from someone else that somewhere around Beaumont books four of five, Avon was cutting their list and I was on the drop side of the equation.  Holly Turner was the one who went to bat for me and persuaded the powers that be to keep me onboard.

Holly was also responsible for having me out in public, selling and signing books from card tables at drugstore and grocery store grand openings wherever she could find them.  She told me once, “Each personal contact is worth ten readers.”  Those are words of wisdom I have lived by ever since.  The people who receive personal e-mail replies from me or personalized bookmarks are each a point of personal contact. And who do my fans have to thank for that?  Holly Turner, that’s who!

By now you may be asking yourself what became of Holly Turner.  Somewhere around the time I was writing Breach of Duty, she was diagnosed with ALS.  A year or so earlier I had been doing a Fred Meyer signing when a scary-looking guy in a wheelchair scooted up to the table and said, “All you people who can walk do the same thing.  Just because someone’s in a wheelchair, you think they have to be good guys.  We’re not, and I can prove it.”  I took him at his word, and a wheelchair bound bad guy showed up in the very next book.  In the process of doing research on my wheelchair-bound villain, I found out about Northwest Mobility, one of the top companies in the country doing handicap vehicle conversions.

When I heard about Holly’s diagnosis I was stunned to absolute silence.  I didn’t contact her because I had no idea what I could say.  Then my galleys came for Name Withheld.  And right there, on the pages in front of me, were the words I had written about Northwest Mobility.  I knew that Holly’s husband, Ralph, was busy making their Whidbey Island cottage wheelchair accessible, but it occurred to me that they probably needed a wheelchair accessible vehicle as well. I put down my galleys and called Holly on the spot.

Holly was a master gardener.  The next time I spoke to her was in regard to a flora question for Breach of Duty.  I left a message on her home phone, and she returned the call from somewhere in Louisiana.  She and Ralph were doing a bucket list trip, visiting gardens all over the country, in the handicapped van they had purchased from Northwest Mobility.  She died only a few months later.

It’s amazing sometimes, how one thing leads to another.  It was doing that Fred Meyer signing, one Holly herself had arranged, that led directly to their having that van.  And it’s no accident that Reenie Bernard,  Ali Reynolds’s friend from childhood on, was diagnosed with ALS in Edge of Evil.  Because that’s what seems to happen—pieces of my life leak into my books and vice versa.  And that stack of book mark requests waiting for my attention stem directly from working with Holly Turner.

In other words, what goes around comes around.  Thank you, Holly.

Now where’s my letter opener?  It must be around here somewhere.