It’s Tuesday. TFOB starts on Friday night. I’ll be flying out on Thursday. I haven’t brought out the suitcase yet, but I’m mentally packing.

This isn’t like the old days when I headed out for three weeks on the road, landing in a different city every day and staying in a different hotel every night. Back then, I changed time zones so often during book tours that after getting back home, it would take days for my body to get back on some sort of reasonable schedule.

Those days were fun, but they were also exhausting. This is four days only, and since Arizona doesn’t acknowledge Daylight Saving time, no time-change adjustment will be necessary. And no hotel changes will be required, either. Same hotel room all four nights.

Our daughter is coming to look after Bill while I’m gone. It’s a reasonably complex undertaking, but I’m sure she’s up to the task. Nonetheless, I’ll be worried about him while I’m away because that’s what caretakers do—they worry.

The truth of the matter is, this is probably my last year of attending TFOB. The ladies from Mostly Books are no longer having a booth at the festival, and I don’t blame them. The physical effort of transporting all those books back and forth has become too much.

I’m worrying about navigating the uneven patches of grass on the mall as I make my way to the tent. I’m worried about the killer stairs to get on and off the stage in the Modern Languages Building. And, at age 80, I’m worried about my stamina.

I’ve enjoyed every minute of TFOB, from the very first one when no one was quite sure how everything would work out. I got a kick out of Bill Viner, the brains behind the whole outfit, jokingly referring to me as “the queen of the festival.” And I loved being honored with the founder’s award. That little statuette of a Navajo storyteller means the world to me because that’s how I’ve always regarded myself—as a storyteller rather than a novelist.

All things considered, it seems as though this is as a good a time as any to bow out gracefully.

So for all you TFOBers out there, if you have a stack of my books that you’ve always wanted to have signed, it’s probably now or never. Feel free to bring them to the signing table. If the line wranglers tell you that there’s a two book limit, feel free to let them know they’re wrong, because if you’re willing to wait until the end of the line, I’ll sign them all.

For the past forty years my corporate policy has always been to leave no book unsigned.

Even at this late date, that’s still true.