Friday, April 12, 2002 posted by Jen at 4/12/2002 11:48:00 AM
Greetings from Austin, where today we encountered the thing we like least about being on the road -- the dread 5 a.m. wakeup call, so you can go be on live TV at 6:40 a.m. (I have mentioned that I'm not a morning person, right?)
So anyhow, the radio alarm clock goes off at five sharp, and of course I can't find the button to turn it off. Oh, I can find the button that switches it to AM just fine, along with the button that allows me to change the time, but not the button to make the damn thing be quiet. And finally I find it, and then phone rings with my backup emergency wake-up call.
"Miz Weener?"
Yeah. Great. Good morning to you, too. (You do know that it's Wyner, right? The infinitely less offensive pronunciation. Note to self: consider using married name while travelling.)
So I take a shower, and dry my hair, and do makeup, and put on the Itchy TV Suit, and my escort drives me to the station, and I'm leafing through the Austin Chronicle's weekend magazine while I wait, and on page 72 I find this listing for my reading tonight:
"JENNIFER WEINER signs copies of and discusses and provides detailed 8X10 glossies with arrows and diagrams and teeny tiny magnifying glasses so you can examine what is GOOD IN BED."
Huh?
Honestly, people, I'm bewildered. They do know it's not a how-to book, right?
Wednesday, April 10, 2002 posted by Jen at 4/10/2002 11:35:00 PM
Dallas rocks.
I mean, seriously! There's killer Mexican food. A Nordstrom where everything I tried on looked great. A Neiman-Marcus right down the street from my hotel. A fun author escort who doesn't mind eating Mexican food with me, or taking me shopping. Life is good.
Oh, and also, GOOD IN BED hit the extended NYT bestseller list! It's number 29, with a bullet!
Okay, maybe no bullet. But it's very exciting news. Making that list is an especially big deal, because most of the books that do are mass-market paperbacks that retail for a mere 6.99, as opposed to my opus, which costs....well, more.
Today was great. Kathleen, said fabulous author escort, picked me up. We did TV. The producer says, "You're a natural!" I thought, whoo-hoo!
Then we did drop-ins. First stop -- a Barnes & Noble, where they have only eight books left, and where staffers buy four of them, with personalized inscriptions, while raving about how much they adored the book.
And that was kind of how it went today -- happy bookstore visits, news of book doing well, signing copies, Mexican food for lunch, another TV taping, more bookstore visits, phone call to check messages at home, exciting news from editor in re: bestseller list, trip to afreomentioned Nordstrom for outfit for reading in the Waldenbooks in Hurst, where the store's assistant manager told me they'd sold 50 (!) copies of the hardcover -- a truly astonishing tally, considering that nobody I know or am related to lives in Texas.
The reading itself attracted a small crowd of really cool readers -- women who brought their hardcovers for me to sign, and who keep up with the blogspot, and who've read the first chapter of IN HER SHOES (and you have, too, right?) Among them was Michelle, who works at another Barnes & Noble, and took the time to go to another bookstore to have her book signed. So after that, we returned the favor, and drove to her store to sign her stock.
And now I'm back in my hotel room, struggling to stay connected to the internet on a telephone line that doesn't seem to like me much. If I haven't responded to your email, it's not that I haven't gotten it, it's that I'm not around much, and when I am this connection is so darn slow that doing anything takes excruciating amounts of time. Tomorrow I'm flying to Austin, where hopefully things will be better, internet-wise.
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Tuesday, April 09, 2002 posted by Jen at 4/09/2002 08:53:00 PM
I'm in Texas!
And I'm in another giant suite! With two bathrooms! And the management just sent up cheese and fruit with a note saying that they've had a long and honorable tradition of hosting authors when they visit Dallas, and that they hope I won't besmirch it with my antics, and my smutty title. Or words to that effect. "Boy, you must be a VIP," said the bellman, pulling my luggage into the huge closet, with a giant tuffet-thing in the middle, in case, I suppose, I get exhausted trying to pick out what to wear and need somewhere convenient to swoon.
Of course, this was after the staff at the front desk giggled over my book title, cooed over the cover, then studied the author photo carefully, looking from the book jacket to my face and then back again. "Well, you've been travelling," one of them said. Hey!
So Cleveland turned out to be pretty cool. Those morning guys I was worried about? Couldn't have been nicer. "Don't be so hard on yourself," the much-feared John Lanigan actually said at one point when I was unfolding one or another of my myriad insecurities. And even though my afternoon TV appearance on 15 Minutes with Fred turned out to be 15 Minutes with Joe (because Fred's on vacation, the lucky bastard), that went well, too.
"How does it feel to write a best-seller?" he asked. And I'm sure I managed to say something, but the truth is that I don't even have words for how totally amazing this whole experience feels right now, what with the great sales, and the wonderful emails (and I do read all of my emails, by the way, even though it's hard to reply to them right now because my internet connections are woefully slow). There's nothing to say about this that isn't a cliche, but it truly is a dream come true. And I don't think I'll ever get over the thrill of walking into a bookstore and seeing something I wrote. With naked legs and cheesecake on it. Life is so good. Thanks to everyone who's read the book, and who's reading this, and took the time to tell me they were amused, or touched, or laughing, or crying. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
So after TV I did drop-ins, and then I went to the Cleveland airport and signed a whole cartload of books at the bookstore there. So if you're going to be flying to or through Cleveland, and you want a signed copy, they got 'em. I even drew little airplanes on a few. Well, they're supposed to be little airplanes. I'm not much with the drawing.
Okay. Am going to find dinner, then work on IN HER SHOES. If you live in Dallas, you can catch me live on "DFW Today" tomorrow at 10:40 in the morning. And I'll see all of y'all in at the Waldenbooks at the Northeast Mall in Hurst tomorrow night!
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Monday, April 08, 2002 posted by Jen at 4/08/2002 09:34:00 PM
Hey, all! Hello (from) Cleveland! Had a great day here. Did radio. Did more radio. Did TV. Did a reading in the fanciest Joseph Beth bookstore I've ever been in in my life -- a store that had books, and a cafe, and also sold dishes and lotions and various things that smelled good. It was great! And the reading was good, too. The audience was split almost fifty-fifty between men and women, which is sure not something I'm used to (at New Words in Cambridge, I had the all-lady audience, which was very...comfortable. We laughed a lot).
But now we're in Cleveland. I bought some cards at the mall this afternoon, and when the woman gave me my change she said, "Go Tribe!" And my first thought -- honest to God -- was, "How does she know I'm Jewish?"
So anyhow, tomorrow morning I'm on the radio with these guys. Should I be worried about people where the station-provided biography advises, "People found him offensive, racist and vulgar, but good or bad, people were listening." Oh, dear.
But I'll worry about that tomorrow. Right now I'm so happy right now, because I made it home in time to watch The Bachelor.
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Welcome to A Moment of Jen, author Jennifer Weiner's constantly-updated take on books, baby, and news of the world. Email me at jen (a) jenniferweiner.com.
