Mountains! Signings!

Well, it’s Tuesday again, and I’m riding on the Empire Builder just coming out of the Cascade Mountains on our way to Seattle. It’s been a fantastic week. I’ve been keeping a daily diary and sending it to a select list of friends who I think might be interested. We’ve been to Needle Nest in Fargo, where there was a great turnout for a signing. I toured a homeless shelter run by the YWCA and got some very useful information. The only problem with Fargo is that the train arrives at a little after three in the morning. Don’t let anyone tell you that midnight is the dead of night. At midnight the bars are still open and there are people around. Three a.m. is too late to be late at night and too early to be early in the morning. Nothing is moving; the whole world is deep asleep. Well, Amtrak doesn’t sleep, they turned up right on time and we climbed aboard and by daylight we were well out across the endless flat plains of North Dakota and Montana on our way to Wolf Point. We had a meager but enthusiastic turnout at their Roosevelt County Public Library, and another in Cut Bank at the Glacier County Library. A woman at Cut Bank, Anne Stevens, very kindly volunteered to give us a private tour of East Glacier National Park the next day. We got close up and personal with the leading edge of the Rocky Mountains that day! It seemed around every curve we were presented with another postcard-perfect view. We saw lots of wild life, including big horn mountain sheep, elk, an impertinent prairie dog who kept coming up to bark at us, and even a grizzly bear who had the audacity to go loping across the big and beautiful, flower-bed-ornamented front lawn of a historic old lodge where, half an hour earlier I had gone strolling.

We had better luck with turnout in Spokane last night, with well over fifty in the audience. Auntie’s Bookstore, a Spokane legend, came to sell books and I signed quite a few. My talk was well received, which is always gratifying. The staff did a super job of promoting and running the event. Special thanks to Pat!

As I am writing this, we have come out of the magnificent Cascade Mountains to Everett, Washington, which is on Puget Sound. A bald eagle was perched on a rock barely bigger than he is along the shore, looking for fish to catch. The tide is out, exposing an acre or two of seaweed with lots of seagulls poking around in it. In the background of the immense sound are snowy mountains. What a great time we are having!

As I am writing this later, we are in Seattle, and it is evening. I did a signing a the famous Seattle Mystery Bookshop and did a little shopping for books. Then we explored historic downtown Seattle, ate seafood at Ivar’s down on the sound -- their clam chowder was very delicious, but I saved the little oyster crackers to feed to the greedy, noisy seagulls standing on a railing alongside the restaurant. These are the seagoing seagulls, the big variety.

Having a lovely time, I cannot highly enough recommend train travel.

A Good Bad Thing

I’ve been doing a lot of signings the last few weeks, and am getting seriously fuzzy-brained. Worse, it’s not over yet. Friday we’re leaving for Galena, IL, and Madison, WI. Hope I don’t end up in Nashville, TN, and Wilmington, DE.

But an interesting thing happened on our way to Des Moines and Omaha last weekend. We stopped in Owatonna, MN, for lunch at Cabela’s. Have you ever been in a Cabela’s? Testosterone City. Guns and ammo, hunting and fishing equipment, and a mountain at the back stacked with stuffed game. Everything from polar bears to pheasants in lifelike poses. But they have great lunches – try their walleye fingers. Anyway, we had lunch and on the way out I saw they had some huge candy canes on sale. We’re at that stage of Christmas giving in our family where we mostly give to one another’s favorite charities in one another’s names. I thought it would be kind of fun to attach the card to a candy cane, especially a really big one. So I picked out a bunch of them and went down to the main floor in front pay for them.

Now, lately I’ve been carrying around a little clutch purse, but for the trip I got out this very large purse and put the clutch inside it. When I paid for the canes, I picked up the bag of them, and the clutch purse, and walked out. It was more than two hours down the road that I needed something from the big purse – and discovered it wasn’t in the back seat.

I called Cabela’s and sure enough, they had the big purse. I was sick with disappointment at myself. I’d put a couple of "show ‘n’ tell" items in there for the signings, plus a whole big packet of Thai silk sample flosses I’ve been giving away to people who buy a copy of Thai Die. I kicked myself all the way to Des Moines and again to Omaha.

I finally decided not to stay for supper in Omaha (paid for by A Stitch in Crime bookstore-needlework shop), but start for home so we could stop at Cabela’s and get my big purse. Because of the Christmas season, they were open really late, so made it in good time. We found ourselves at home late Saturday night, tired but in possession of the purse.

And the next morning woke to find the upper midwent cowering under rain, freezing rain and sleet. There were cars in ditches all along I-35. We would have been driving home on that highway if I hadn’t left my purse in Cabela’s.

New topic: I’ve been getting some positive reviews from the Big Guys: Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, etc. Does anyone know if this translates into sales?