BOOKTOUR BLOG
Jake’s Book Tour: October 19 SEATTLE
We arrive in Seattle amid reports that the city is bracing for a major wind and rainstorm. Lisa, who has been hoping for dramatic weather all along, is excited by the news. Amber is just happy to be home, and excited that we will be doing our final event at Langley Middle School where she was once a student and where her mother still teaches.
Langley is located on Whidbey Island, a fifteen-minute ferry ride from the mainland. After our school event, we plan to stay on Whidbey Island for dinner to celebrate Amber’s 30th birthday, but when we drive back to her house, the power lines are down and a fallen tree has blocked off access to her street. “Maybe we better get back to Seattle,” our escort (no gun) suggests. And finally Lisa is rewarded with dramatic weather, as our ferry lurches across the windswept waters of Puget Sound, with waves crashing against the boat and splattering the decks.
In less than an hour I leave for the airport to fly home. I will miss being on tour. I will miss visiting new cities, staying in nice hotels, sleeping late in the morning, charging my meals to Random House, speaking at schools and bookstores, doing media events, being driven around by colorful characters, and spending time with Amber and Lisa. But I am ready to go home. I want to see my students and colleagues at Salk. I want to sleep in my own bed. And tomorrow morning, I want to wake up with my two little daughters, give them lots of hugs and kisses, and tell them all about the adventures I’ve had.
Jake’s Book Tour: October 17 SAN FRANCISCO
After four hours in Austin, we get four days in San Francisco. My wife Kira is already here when we arrive, having flown across country to join me on this part of the tour. Our two little girls are back in New York with my parents, where, according to my three-and-a-half-year-old, they are getting many special treats. It’s a bit surreal to be away without the girls, and we vacillate between feelings of freedom and guilt. There is a goldfish in our hotel room, and on the first night, my wife carries it down to the front desk and says she can’t have it in the room. She tells me that the fish, bobbing on the side of the bowl and puckering its mouth, reminds her of our youngest daughter.
We did another live television interview on a show called “View from the Bay.” It’s sandwiched between General Hospital and Oprah, so our audience was mostly moms, and our hosts asked us questions about how to pick the right books for teenage children. Right before us on the show was David Frei, the guy who hosts the Westminster Dog Show, with two unbelievably cute dogs. Talk about a tough act to follow.
At a bookstore reading that night, we met an even more interesting character, a six-foot-seven inch man, who works as the librarian at an all girls’ middle school. It turns out that he is a professional storyteller, named Walter the Giant. He also happens to be on the committee to hand out the Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature, which can pretty much make your career as an author. During the question and answer session, someone asked what we were currently reading, and I mentioned The Grounding of Group 6. “Great book,” Walter the Giant bellowed from the back row. So I’ve got that going for me.
Yesterday we drove to a Barnes and Noble outside the city for an afternoon event. Only my wife, her friend, and our escort (no gun) were in the audience, but a small group of teenagers lingered nearby. “Come on over,” we coaxed. “We’re going to be reading from our books.” They were too cool for that. “I’ll pay you,” fellow author Amber said. One boy stepped forward. “How much?” “Two dollars,” Amber said. The others shook their heads and walked away, but this boy accepted the money and sat down in the front row. He could have left after one of us read, but he stayed through all three readings and then asked many wonderful questions. His name was Roberto, he was 14, and he and his younger sister (who was off to the side, too shy to join us) spent afternoons at the bookstore until their mom (who worked at a deli and whose boyfriend had recently run over her foot with the car) got off work and could pick them up. He told us that he liked to read, but had not found anything he really loved since he was 11. He liked stories about animals and was interested in books that dealt with parents with alcohol problems and annoying younger sisters. We made him a book list, my wife bought him a copy of David Klass’s You Don’t Know Me, and we gave him signed copies of all of our books (with Amber and Lisa signing copies over to his sister.) I think when the tour is over and I look back at everything we did, the 30 minutes we spent with Roberto will be what sticks with me most strongly.
Jake’s Book Tour: October 12 AUSTIN
A 4:00 a.m. wake-up to make the first of four flights today. That’s right, FOUR! All together, we spend about 13 hours driving to and from airports, waiting for our flights, and flying across the country. Somewhere in the middle of all that, we do a reading and signing at Austin’s famous Book People, and we eat some truly delicious pumpkin pancakes.
Austin’s slogan is “keep it weird,” and the residents seem to pride themselves on being a quirky bunch. “We’re nothing like the rest of Texas,” our escort Kristen tells us. I ask her if she has a gun, and she laughs and shakes her head no as if it’s the craziest question in the world. Later, as we finish our pancakes, she does admit to having taught riflery in camp when she was younger. But that was when she still lived in Houston.
I’ve been reading a young adult novel from the 1980s called The Grounding of Group 6. It’s about five kids who are sent to an expensive boarding school to get themselves and their lives straightened out. What they don’t know is that their parents have in fact contracted with the school to have them killed. It’s actually quite hilarious in a dark, twisted kind of way.
Goodbye Texas.
Jake’s Book Tour: October 12 MIAMI
We arrived in Miami yesterday, and our new escort, Emily, met us at the airport. I must have smiled at her, because she grabbed my arm, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and said, “Thank goodness. You look so serious in your author photo, I thought you were going to be a real grump.” On the drive back to the hotel, I asked her if she carried a gun, and she nearly jumped out of her seat in shock. “Heavens, no,” she said. So now it’s one escort with a gun, one escort without a gun. Next stop Texas.
It’s been so much fun traveling around with Amber and Lisa. We begin our school presentations by playing a game called “three truths and a lie.” So here is what I have learned about my two fellow writers: Amber has a pet rooster named Fabio, makes elaborate wedding cakes as a hobby, and reads fifteen to twenty books at a time. Lisa plays a game called Netball (an Australian version of basketball in which you can run with the ball), once threw a lit match off stage while she was acting, setting fire to the pants of a man in the audience, and once defended her boyfriend from a pack of thugs by acting psychotic and freaking them out. (She demonstrates her psychotic act, much to the delight of the students.) One other interesting thing about Lisa: Apparently, the weather in Australia is rather stable, and so she is extremely curious about what it would be like to experience a natural disaster. Throughout our stay in Miami, she has been hoping for a hurricane, and she keeps asking what the chances are that we will get an earthquake once we arrive in San Francisco.
This morning we were on live television. (By tomorrow, you should be able to see the clip by going to www.nbc6.net and then clicking on “South Florida Today” and then on “Friday’s show.”) Since we are on the “teen voices” author tour, the hosts of the show thought we were all going to be teenagers, which I suppose would have made a more interesting story. We were all nervous about being on live television, but afterward everyone said we had done really well. At the very least, I know we didn’t suck.
Tonight we are off to a bookstore as part of something called “Teen Band Jam Nights,” in which the store lures teenagers to come out on a Friday night by providing live music and pizza. (A high school Ska band called the Corrupters is kicking things off.) This is supposed to be a hip-edgy event, and so I’ve been given the green light to read my chapter about masturbation. My Uncle Scott and Aunt Joan will be there, but nothing shocks them. My wife’s grandmother, on the other hand…
Jake’s Book Tour: October 10 PITTSBURGH
My book tour got off to a rather inauspicious start when I arrived at Laguardia Airport to find that my 1:00 flight to Pittsburgh had been delayed until 3:30. No problem. The flight was only a little over an hour and I didn’t have to be at the bookstore until 7:00. We boarded the plane, and the captain announced that there might be a bit of a delay taking off. Two hours and forty-five minutes. Maybe it was good that by the time I landed I was already too late to make the event, otherwise the forty minutes it took baggage claim personnel to find my luggage would have been a wee bit frustrating.
In my hotel room, I began to read through those magazines and brochures they leave telling you about all the great things to do in their city. Amazingly, Pittsburgh was rated the most livable city in America this year by something called the “Places Rated Almanac.” The way they come up with the ranking is to evaluate a city in nine different categories and then total the numbers. Pittsburgh did not finish in the top twenty cities in any category, but it did well enough in each one to come away with the best total. (New York, by contrast, did extremely well in several categories, but things like cost of living knocked it out of the running.) So basically, Pittsburgh is a city that doesn’t totally suck in any way. And after about 24 hours here, that seems about right. My hotel: it doesn’t suck. The sliders I ate at the bar last night: they didn’t suck. The feel of the city as you drive around: it doesn’t suck. And the Pittsburgh airport: actually very nice. I’m traveling with two other young adult authors, Amber Kizer (from Seattle) and Lisa Shanahan (from Australia). They are smart and funny, and we all get along great.
Our escort while we’re in Pittsburgh is an older woman named Sandi who has run a business for many years guiding out-of-towners around the city. Already she has blessed us with the following gems:
1) She asked Lisa if it was true that in Australia people cannot carry guns and expressed extreme disapproval when Lisa said that that was in fact true. Do you carry a gun? Lisa asked. I sure do, Sandi replied. So that’s reassuring.
2) As she drove us through town this morning, she turned to me and said that we were in a Jewish neighborhood, and then she explained to all of us that Pittsburgh has lots of different kinds of neighborhoods for people who speak different languages.
3) As we approached our hotel, she told me that we were close to a Hooters if I wanted to go. We visited a huge high school this morning and spoke to about twenty students who take a creative writing elective. We had trouble finding a parking place so Sandi suggested we park in a handicapped space and that I pretend to be crippled. I was a bit nervous when we went through the metal detectors that she might be packing, but I guess she had the sense not to bring her gun inside with her. Our presentation went pretty well, I think. At the very least, it didn’t suck.