Damage Control went on sale July 22.  It debuted at # 8 on the NYTimes list at #8 (Tied for 7th, but they go in alphabetical order, so the B's have it.)  Thank you to all of you who went out and bought early, and in some cases often, and made that happen!!  Making the list is a BIG DEAL, and I'm really happy to have landed there.  It's a very long road from Bisbee, Arizona, to the NYTimes Bestsellers list!

You may be wondering why the blog has gone so quiet.  We've been busy, and when I say we, I need both Bill and I.  He's been driving, programming the Garmin (our life-saver) and getting us to events on time.  I do the signings, the talks, and the interviews.  Starting with the KUOW interview on July 21, we've done a minimum of one event a day.  (Usually, on non flying days, it's two.)  One morning, before the day's two signing events I did four phone interviews.  

Since July 22, we've been in Seattle, Lake Forest Park, Redmond, Everett, Silverdale, Marysville, Bellingham, Spokane.  Those were just the cities in Washington.  After that we went to Lincoln and Omaha, NE, along with several cities in North Carolina where I did appearances in Raleigh, Cary, Fearrington Village, Southern Pines, and Charlotte, interspersing interviews along the way.

As someone who's accustomed to those "big" Western states, I wasn't particularly worried about our saturation-bombing stint in North Carolina.  I mean, how big could it be?  It turns out North Carolina is big enough!  One day we did two signings and drove the better part of two hundred miles without ever venturing outside the state.  We had a chance to have dinner and visit with some relatives after the second signing in Charlotte, but by the time dinner was over I was wiped slick.  Then it was on to Fort Smith, AR, and Wichita, KS before moving on to Arizona and doing and a whole host of signings and interviews there.  Are you tired yet?  If reading this makes you tired, try doing it.

We could NOT have managed all that if we had been flying commercially.  For one thing, we have WAY too much luggage.  For another, we don't have enough time.  Two to three hours in the airport on each leg would make it totally impossible.  For another thing, the modern world of airline hubs makes direct flights to and from a lot of the smaller places impossible.  When we left Wichita, we flew into Sedona.  No commercial flights come and go from Sedona at all!  So thank you for putting me on the list, but thank you, too, for making our corporate jet, nicknamed AirJance, possible.

At a signing early in this tour, someone asked me did I mind going on tour.  If you look at the paragraphs above, you can figure out, it's hard work.  Even on the jet.  We're away from home for the better part of a month, sleeping in strange beds and checking in and out of hotels, some of which are less than wonderful.  During an early morning trip to the bathroom at the hotel in Lincoln, I was dismayed to find myself looking eyeball-to-eyeball with an immense cockroach.  And when I tried to make coffee in the room, I found that the paper coffee cup (single coffee cup) had somebody else's left-over coffee still in it.  We've notified the publisher that that particular hotel needs to come off the list.

So much for the glamour of being on tour, right?  Not exactly.  Two nights later we found ourselves in the luxurious comfort of the Umstead Hotel and Spa in Cary, NC.  The Umpstead is a five diamond resort that's a world away from the dive in Lincoln.  It turns out, in this case, you have to take the GOOD with the BAD!

But back to the question about going on tour.  No, I don't mind.  If I weren't out here on tour, I wouldn't have met the oncology nurse who told me that she used a conversation about my books to calm a terrified cancer patient who was starting her first round of chemo.   She discovered they were both fans of my books.  She said talking about one title after another helped give the patient something else to think about besides her upcoming medical procedures.  And I would have missed speaking to a young woman in North Carolina who was a transplanted Arizonan who started reading my books when she was living in Hong Kong as an expatriate and who used the Joanna Brady books to "go back home."

And I wouldn't have met the man who came to a signing in order to purchase a copy of the latest book for his auntie's 95th birthday.  And I wouldn't have had the chance of doing a joint gig with the star of North Carolina and one of my favorite people, Ann B. Ross, the author of the Miss Julia books.

When I'm out on the road and talking about my book of poetry, After the Fire, I can see the nods of people who, like me, have lived with the scourge of drug or alcohol addiction.  When I read some of the poems, people often come up afterwards and say, "The same thing happened to me."  And I'm able to autograph their books with the words, "Been there, done that, got the T-shirt."

One of those poems, in particular, I think is really important.  By 1980, I had been with my first husband for 18 years and through 9 courses of treatment for alcoholism.  When he showed up at my six year old son's T-ball game so smashed that he had to crawl from the bleachers back to the car, I knew I had to do something.  Eventually, I moved my husband out of the house and filed for a divorce.  The morning after he left, I went shopping for groceries.  When I came home, I set the groceries down on the kitchen table and wrote this.  It's called The Collector.

I like the green ones best.

I count them up as any miser would

And watch them grow with satisfaction

For they are the tangible symbol 

Of what is processed here--

Lettuce, toilet paper, pork and beans.

The taxes must be paid in cash

God knows there's precious little of that.

Some say trading stamps are going out of style.

I'll collect them 'til I die.

At least it's something I do well.

On that bleak morning in March of 1980, I thought that my life was over; that because my marriage had failed, I had failed; that nothing good would ever happen to me again.  And on that morning, although I had always wanted to be a writer, I HADN'T WRITTEN A SINGLE BOOK.  I didn't start writing my first novel until two years later, about that same time of year, the middle of March of 1982.  Damage Control is my 39th!!! published book.  So obviously there was a lot of good waiting for me in the future, but I had to make some tough changes in order to find it.

And so, when I go on tour, I have a chance to meet my fans and hear their stories.  But they also have a chance to hear mine.  And for some of the people in the various audiences, people struggling with the same issues that bedeviled me, I hope my story offers both some comfort and some hope.  Yes, it's tough falling in love with addicts.  When they're not passed out cold, they can be charming and engaging.  But addiction is also a potentially fatal disease, and my husband died of it at age 42, a year and a half after I divorced him.  When you're immeshed in all that heartache--when you begin to realize how much trouble you're in--it's impossible to imagine that anyone else in the universe has ever been as dumb as you have been.

So when I write on the title page of After the Fire, "Been there, done that, got the T-shirt," I really mean it.  And I hope, in the process, I'm offering a few other despairing people a hand up.

Yes, I'm tired.  Yes, touring is hard work.  Did I mention it's very hot and muggy in North Carolina?  When I finally get back home, I'll probably burn all the clothes in my suitcase.  (I won't really, but I'll want to.)

But, as I keep reminding myself every morning when I wake up and try to figure out where they've put the bathroom this time, it's part of the job.  And so is posting the blog.

PS  It turns out that posting the blog on the road was far tougher than we thought it would be.  We're safely home now.  I've spent the day in comfy clothes, in my comfy chair, drinking my own special blend of coffee.  I did do one interview, but only one, and since it was radio, I didn't have to get dressed up and put on makeup to do it.

Glad to go on the road.  Glad to be home.  I guess I really do have the best job in the world.