The trip to New York was wonderful.\u00a0 Sitting down to dinner with the people who have shepherded my career for more than thirty years was especially gratifying.\u00a0 Among the invited guests were my first editor from Avon Books, John Douglas, as well as Carolyn Reidy who was my initial publisher at Avon Books and who is now at the helm of Simon and Schuster, the publishing home of the Ali Reynolds series.<\/p>\n
When Avon went to HarperCollins in the nineties, so did I\u2014along with J.P. Beaumont, Joanna Brady, and the Walkers.\u00a0 So my HarperCollins people were there as well. Current editors and past editors as well as a phalanx of corporate and publicity folks from both sides were in attendance, and it meant so much to be able to tell all those folks thank you.<\/p>\n
And the Strand awards evening was also lovely.\u00a0 They gave me a gorgeous glass trophy which is being shipped home to me rather than carried in luggage.\u00a0 It\u2019s incredibly beautiful\u2014photo to follow\u2014but made of solid glass and, as a consequence, very heavy. It turns out our luggage was already heavy enough, thank you very much.\u00a0 More on that later.<\/p>\n
I enjoyed my participation in ThrillerFest and was glad to be a part of it, including having a chance to visit with Lisa Preston, an up and coming Washington State author whose first book, The Clincher, is due out in November.\u00a0 The heroine in that one is a farrier, and a clincher is one of her horse shoeing tools.\u00a0 Believe me, it\u2019s a fun read, and in reading it you\u2019ll learn a lot about horses and shoeing same!<\/p>\n
We came home and found ourselves face to face\u2014well almost\u2014with a small miracle.\u00a0 Seven years ago, when we redid the backyard and turned the leaky fishpond into one that actually held water, we went to PetsMart and bought a passel of goldfish plus one plug-ugly Koi\u2014mottled grey with a red head.\u00a0 In the beginning the koi was about the same size as all the other fish, but when he outgrew everybody else, we came to call him the Big Guy.\u00a0 Last summer he was MIA all summer long.\u00a0 Believing him to have fallen prey to my nemesis, the blue heron who regards our pond as an appetizer dispenser, I went so far as to write a requiem for the Big Guy at the end of the summer.\u00a0 But yesterday and today, when I went down to feed the fish, there he was\u2014bigger than ever.\u00a0 We should probably rename him Sasquatch!\u00a0 But I\u2019m so grateful to have him back.\u00a0 YAY!<\/p>\n
And now for the bad news.\u00a0 I have injured my right shoulder.\u00a0 I can still type, and I can actually autograph books, but since I can\u2019t lift my arm over my head\u2014or even up to my nose–putting luggage into an overhead bin is pretty much off the table.\u00a0 With Bill\u2019s bad back, I have always been the designated luggage lifter.\u00a0 In other words, he can’t do it, either.\u00a0 As a consequence, after doing close to sixty book tours over the past 33 years, I\u2019ve chosen to cancel the one for Field of Bones this fall.\u00a0 I\u2019m sorry, and I thank you in advance for your understanding.\u00a0 At this point, I\u2019m doing PT and hoping to avoid any kind of surgical procedure, but I can tell you for sure that getting old is not for sissies.<\/p>\n
I will be signing and shipping books to the Poisoned Pen<\/a> in Scottsdale, Mostly Books<\/a> in Tucson, and VJ Books<\/a> in Portland.\u00a0 They won\u2019t be personalized, but they will be signed with my signature red pen.\u00a0 You might want to place your order early so they have enough.<\/p>\n That\u2019s all for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The trip to New York was wonderful.\u00a0 Sitting down to dinner with the people who have shepherded my career for more than thirty years was especially gratifying.\u00a0 Among the invited guests were my first editor from Avon Books, John Douglas, as well as Carolyn Reidy who was my initial publisher at Avon Books and who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33,6,165,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-tour-2","category-traveling","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-qt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1642,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions\/1642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}