On the Road

It’s Tuesday and I'm posting early. I have my traveling clothes on, because late this evening I am boarding The Empire Builder heading west. I have filled my biggest suitcase -- the one too large to go into an overhead bin on an airplane -- turned all my signing and speaking info into a four-page document, and packed only the clothing I think I really, really need. To show how far down I have culled things, I am taking only one hat. Unfortunately, it is too big to fit into any of my hat boxes and so has to come along in a cardboard box tied shut with cord.

I am going to post this early because the train arrives in Fargo at 3:30 tomorrow morning, and I will go to my hotel and right into bed to sleep until around ten, when Tanya and I will rise and breakfast and be picked up by someone from Nordic Needle around eleven to begin a tour of the city. I am sending my sleuth Betsy to Fargo in the book I am currently writing and so need to have a look around. Then in the evening I will do a signing and talk at the needlework shop, then start the long and tedious wait for the 3:30 Empire Building to come through again and take us to the next stop, in Montana. I will do my best to post something every Wednesday during the next three weeks, and hope I will have something adventurous, or amusing, to say about this grand tour.

Yesterday four of us went to the Mall of America to be pampered in a nail shop -- manicure and pedicure. Because my signing/talking outfit is black and yellow, I opted for yellow fingernail polish. For the first several hours after, I kept thinking I’d somehow dipped my fingertips into mustard. But there’s nothing like bold and fancy treatment to make you feel ready for anything. Today I am puttering and dithering around the apartment, making adjustments to the packing, going through the lists of things I want to bring and that I have to do before leaving, checking the schedule, and worrying. I am a great worrier. Fortunately, I don’t worry about travel until it’s too late to change my mind about going in the first place. Otherwise, I’d never go anywhere and would miss out on some great times.

The cats know something is up. I think they’ve come to understand that when a suitcase is being packed, they are going to be left behind for a while. Between naps they are being whiny and clingy. This is going to be, for them, the longest while I have ever disappeared. But my husband isn’t coming along, so it’s not a total disaster. Actually, a total disaster would be trying to bring them along on a trip. As John D. MacDonald wrote in his book about his two cats, The House Guests, “I would rather burn bamboo splinters under my fingernails than drive three thousand miles with . . . cats.” Me, too

Traveling On

Last year I received an invitation to be the keynote speaker at an Embroiderers Guild of America regional meeting in Salt Lake City. I’ve never been to Salt Lake City so I thought it would be fun to go. Then I got this grand idea that it would be fun to take a train rather than fly. Many years ago I took the California Zephyr from San Francisco to Milwaukee so I wanted to go a different way. I looked up routes and decided on the Empire Builder which goes along the northern tier of the country. And so long as I was going, I decided it would be fun to make a book tour of it, even though I won’t have a new book to publicize. I asked a friend to come along and we're leaving June 1, arriving in Salt Lake City June 15.

I spent a number of hours this past Sunday in the company of that friend, going over the details. We have the itinerary fixed at this point, but hadn’t arranged for hotel accommodations at the various stops. So we sat down and called up the locations on my computer and began possibilities and room rates. On Thursday, June 3, for example, we’re stopping at Wolf Point, Montana, arriving at 11:41, according to the Amtrak schedule. That evening I’ll give a talk at the Roosevelt County Public Library and then we’re free until 11:41 June 4, when the Empire Builder comes through again and we get back on board. According to the Internet, there are several motels in town, and the one nearest the railroad depot is Homestead Inn. So we called Homestead Inn and made a reservation for two.

That doesn’t sound difficult, and it wasn’t. But if you will go to my web site, Monica-Ferris.com, you will see that Wolf Point is the second stop of ten. The schedule is a complex of reserved coach seats, hotel rooms, and Superliner Roomettes along the way. Sometimes the train arrives at highly inconvenient hours, such as at Spokane (1:40 am!). I will be appearing at libraries, needlework shops, and bookstores at the stops -- except at East Glacier Park, Montana, and Reno, Nevada, where we will take a break to recoup and do a little sight-seeing. (We're staying at the Dancing Bears Inn in East Glacier Park, isn't that cute?)

Please, if you live in Fargo; Wolf Point or Cut Bank, Montana; Spokane; Seattle; Portland, Oregon; Sacramento, or Salt Lake City, check out my web site to see where and when I’ll be in your city. If you do needlework, bring a sample along, I love to look at needlework. If you don’t do needlework, come anyway; I’ll be very glad to see you!

So long as we’re talking about appearances, I’m going to be at the Myrtle Mabee Public Library in Belgrade, Minnesota, on Friday at 6:30. Then I’m driving to Rosemont, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago near O’Hare Airport), to the huge Donald E. Stevens Convention Center for the International Quilt Show. I’ll be sitting at The Craftsman’s Touch booth from noon to seven on Saturday and from ten to two on Sunday.

In any of these locations, look for the woman in the fancy hat, and hope along with me that it doesn’t get crushed on the long train trip.

A Golfing Lesson & Other News

Remember last week when I asked if the needlework store Classy Threads was still in business? I’ve been doing too much needlework. The store sells clothing. I should have known that, I’m old enough to remember when "threads" was beatnik slang for clothing. D’oh!

Eye report: Nothing to report. Vision still blurry, doubled at a distance. My doctor is pleased with the reduction in eye pressure, he told me today that sometimes the tiny cut will heal up completely and the pressure inside the eyeball will climb again. My pressure is nice and low. He says the blurring will heal in time.

I ad my first golf lesson yesterday evening. The local pro says to start with putting, that putting is more than half the game. I’ve been playing miniature golf for years and so thought there was nothing I could learn about putting. Boy, was I wrong! I couldn’t believe how quickly I improved once I lined up my feet, my body, my club and the ball properly with regard to the hole. Now I want to go find a putting green and practice some more – but I won’t have a chance tomorrow, and I have another lesson on Thursday. There’s a miniature golf course out in Edina that is laid out on real grass not that indoor-outdoor carpet of most of them. I’ll have to go out there this summer to see if my game is better there as well as on a putting green. The only thing I was really bad at during my lesson yesterday was "readng" the green. A good player can see the subtle shifts of terrain that cause a ball to drift left or right from the straight line to the hole. Maybe it’s the blurry vision messing me up. Now I have another reason to be impatient to heal.

I have had an extraordinary opportunity handed to me. A friend from church knows a Hollywood producer and in the course of "pitching" some ideas he had for movies and television shows, he talked about my Betsy Devonshire series. And the producer was intrigued enough to ask for something in writing. So between pushes of writing Buttons and Bones I am now also working on synopses of six episodes of a one-hour television show featuring my sleuth. It’s a learn-as-you-go opportunity, as I am not used to writing for the screen and am finding it quite different from writing straight prose. This all may come to nothing, of course; I understand most proposals go nowhere. But it’s exciting none the less? Who do you think should play Betsy? Who would make a great Godwin? How about Jill?

Short Subjects

Yesterday I found out that I will need eye surgery on both my eyes. Fortunately, it is a fairly common surgery, with a fairly safe bet of sailing though it with no problems at all. I found out a couple of years ago that I have glaucoma in both eyes, but the eye drops I’ve been using are not bringing the pressure down enough to stop it from damaging my optic nerve. So they propose to cut tiny "trapdoors" in each eye to release liquid and ease the pressure. The surgery will take place on March 19 and April 2 and I will wear an eye patch for a few days after each procedure. Suitably ornamented with sequins, I assure you.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, a season of repentance, reflection and renewal. I wonder how many people caught up in the wildness of Mardi Gras understand it used to be a last hurrah before the stern period of Lent? I consider myself a Christian, but I’m not going to throw myself into all the stern ways of marking Lent – heck not even half of them. But then I didn’t get to go to Mardi Gras, either. :)

I want to take a long train trip early in the summer of 2010, from Minneapolis to Seattle, then down along the coast, then east to Salt Lake City, where I’ll be the speaker at a an Embroiderers’ Guild of America Convention. If anyone out there knows how to go about organizing such a trip – I’d like to stop along the way and do book signings and also take a couple of days to explore Yellowstone – please contact me. Thank you.

Travel Notes

I’m packing for Nashville, going to a national needlework market put on by The National Needlework Association, an organization by and for needlework shop owners. Since I’m going by car, I’m going to bring a lot of luggage. Are you like that, too? I can travel light when I’m flying, though that generally means I can bring just one hat, and I have to carry that one on my head. But give me a car, and oh, boy! Two suitcases! Three or even four hats!

When traveling by plane, I have to ask myself, "What can’t I do without?" When traveling by car, it’s, "What else do I want to bring along?" This time I have to go a little light on that because I’m traveling with two other women, and while we’re good friends, I don’t think they’d appreciate me taking up all the space allotted to luggage.

I submitted the synopsis of what I hope will be the Betsy Devonshire novel to follow Blackwork to my agent late last week. She read it and called with a couple of suggestions, one of which was absolutely brilliant and exposed a blind spot I’d evidently developed about the plot. Oh, the joys of having a really good agent! Thank you, Nancy Yost! Any of you writers ever do that? Come up with a beautiful idea for a plot and write it out, either as a synopsis or even as the entire story and have someone, on reading it, point out a perfectly obvious flaw in the thing? One that until that moment totally escaped you? Makes you bite your knuckles to stifle the ugly words coming up your throat, doesn’t it? Unless that someone is in your writers’ group or is your agent, or a good friend, or someone, anyone, who can prevent a publisher from seeing it in its flawed state. Then, while you still bite and mutter, you afterwards send thanks wafting upward that you were saved from making a mistake that could have cost you a sale. Or at least made your editor at the publishing house start wondering if you were losing your touch.

I am in the very early stages of planning a train trip out west. The destination is Salt Lake City, for an Embroiderers Guild of America convention in the summer of 2010 – does anyone else still think a number like 2010 doesn’t look like a year? – but I want to travel down the west coast, stopping at needlework shops and bookstores along the way to do signings. I love train travel and this will be the train trip of a lifetime. As soon as EGA firms up the date of the convention, I’ll start lining up stops on this trip. I wish a whole bunch of stitchers could come along for a huge, lengthy stitching retreat!