Yes, it is time to saddle up, but first let’s take that old saw about “six degrees of separation\u201d out for a drive.<\/p>\n
I write books.\u00a0 I do not have secretarial help.\u00a0 I answer emails on a daily basis, but when I\u2019m deep in the writing process, anything that requires a snail mail response gets put on a back burner.\u00a0 I save the messages in my new mail file and get to them when I get to them.\u00a0 Occasionally I will hit a wrong button on my keyboard and an email will vanish.\u00a0 I\u2019ve learned to track them down in Trash, but if you accidentally hit that same button when you\u2019re in the Trash file, you\u2019re \u2026 well \u2026 out of luck.\u00a0 (I was going to use a more colorful expression.\u00a0 My mother, Evie, would be proud that I chose not to do so.)<\/p>\n
I received an email from a fan named JoAnn Jones, somewhere in South Carolina, asking for something for herself and for her two sisters who are also fans of my books.\u00a0 I read the email, realized I\u2019d have to do a snail-mail response on that one and saved it as new\u2014for a while.\u00a0 For several weeks, I believe.\u00a0 Book writing was at a critical stage at the time.\u00a0 Then when it was time to do snail mail\u2014including bookmarks which went out yesterday\u2014I started dealing with waiting emails.\u00a0 Unfortunately JoAnn\u2019s had disappeared without a trace.<\/p>\n
I checked my database, but she\u2019s not listed there.\u00a0 She must be someone who has visited my website because she had my email address.\u00a0 She may be a Facebook or Blog follower, but I don\u2019t have access to those addresses.<\/p>\n
So here\u2019s where the six-degrees thing comes into play.\u00a0 If one of my readers just happens to know a fan of mine from South Carolina named JoAnn Jones, someone who has two sisters who are also fans, please let her know she needs to resend that missing message.\u00a0 And she should do it soon\u2014before I go to work on another book.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, I head out for Fort Myers, Florida, on Friday morning to participate in the Southwest Florida Readers Conference.\u00a0 The following week I\u2019ll be in Tucson for the Tucson Festival of Books followed by a couple of events in Phoenix.\u00a0 It\u2019s not like book tours from the old days, but it counts.<\/p>\n
After two years of not traveling at all, I\u2019m trying to get my head back into the travel groove.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got Shuttle Express lined up to get me back and forth from the airport.\u00a0 I\u2019m gathering the items that will need to be packed tomorrow.\u00a0\u00a0 One trip will be carry-on only; one won\u2019t.\u00a0 That means I have to have two separate packing mindsets.\u00a0 And I\u2019m already dreading the ungodly hour I\u2019ll need to be up and out on Friday morning.<\/p>\n
Still it will be good to see live people in an audience as opposed to speaking into a computer screen sitting on my dining room table.\u00a0 I\u2019m ready to hear people laugh aloud again, and I\u2019ll bet you are, too.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yes, it is time to saddle up, but first let’s take that old saw about “six degrees of separation\u201d out for a drive. I write books.\u00a0 I do not have secretarial help.\u00a0 I answer emails on a daily basis, but when I\u2019m deep in the writing process, anything that requires a snail mail response gets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-EL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527","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=2527"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2529,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions\/2529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}