It\u2019s Tuesday. TFOB starts on Friday night. I\u2019ll be flying out on Thursday. I haven\u2019t brought out the suitcase yet, but I\u2019m mentally packing.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n
Those days were fun, but they were also exhausting. This is four days only, and since Arizona doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Our daughter is coming to look after Bill while I\u2019m gone. It\u2019s a reasonably complex undertaking, but I\u2019m sure she\u2019s up to the task. Nonetheless, I\u2019ll be worried about him while I\u2019m away because that\u2019s what caretakers do\u2014they worry.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t blame them. The physical effort of transporting all those books back and forth has become too much.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m worrying about navigating the uneven patches of grass on the mall as I make my way to the tent. I\u2019m worried about the killer stairs to get on and off the stage in the Modern Languages Building. And, at age 80, I\u2019m worried about my stamina. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve 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 \u201cthe queen of the festival.\u201d And I loved being honored with the founder\u2019s award. That little statuette of a Navajo storyteller means the world to me because that\u2019s how I\u2019ve always regarded myself\u2014as a storyteller rather than a novelist.<\/p>\n
All things considered, it seems as though this is as a good a time as any to bow out gracefully. <\/p>\n
So for all you TFOBers out there, if you have a stack of my books that you\u2019ve always wanted to have signed, it\u2019s probably now or never. Feel free to bring them to the signing table. If the line wranglers tell you that there\u2019s a two book limit, feel free to let them know they\u2019re wrong, because if you\u2019re willing to wait until the end of the line, I\u2019ll sign them all.<\/p>\n
For the past forty years my corporate policy has always been to leave no book unsigned. <\/p>\n
Even at this late date, that\u2019s still true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s Tuesday. TFOB starts on Friday night. I\u2019ll be flying out on Thursday. I haven\u2019t brought out the suitcase yet, but I\u2019m mentally packing. This isn\u2019t 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. […]<\/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":[33,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-tour-2"],"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\/3253","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=3253"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3254,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3253\/revisions\/3254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}