Tour Diary, 18 October 2024

Time is a flat circle

You may have noticed my lovely content calendar fell apart somewhere around September 24. Seeing as that was the day Graveyard Shift came out, small wonder—especially because the fates conspired to make me do the final drafts of Hot Wax before production while I was on the first leg of my tour. Basically nothing but those two books has existed for me for the last three weeks. Time has folded in on itself like an accordion. I’ve been doing this and only this for my entire life.

There’s definitely an element of déjà vu, and not just because I’ve been living out of my car and interchangeable hotels in one way or another for most of the last two years. Every tour I’ve ever been on seesawed between mind-numbing routine and the absolute unknown. Every Hampton Inn from here to eternity follows the same stylistic schematic, but you never know when a big rig might jackknife across three lanes of highway and burst into flames.

But most days on the road look a bit like this, with regional variations:

• 8:00-10:00 am - Wake up and try to remember where you are. Choke down abominable hotel coffee while packing your bag with one hand and checking email with the other. Inhale a granola bar, gas up the car, and hit the road.

• 10:00 am-2:00 pm - Drive, unless it’s a train day. Phone calls with agent, publicist, interviewers, assistant, or some combination thereof. Cram a research audiobook/podcast/interview in one ear and research tunes in the other. Gnaw on revision problems between snarls of construction and traffic. Stop once or twice for gas and coffee (still bad, but a different and less unbearable bad, when brewed at a truck stop) and check that you didn’t miss any notifications that are actually important.

• 2:00-3:00 pm - Check into a new hotel that looks exactly like the last hotel, review event logistics, unpack only as much as you have to.

• 3:00-5:30 pm - Email, revisions, PR until it’s time to get dressed and go. Race to the gym and order a sandwich from the treadmill if there’s time. Otherwise, dump half a protein shake into a coffee cup of dry cereal because fuck it.

• 5:30-9:30 pm - Event du jour! Talk to booksellers, talk to readers, talk to the other writer you’re in conversation with. Enter a weird fugue state where your energy is keyed up so high it feels like you swallowed plutonium but burn it off at a steady enough rate that you seem calm on the outside until the end of the signing line is in sight and fatigue hits you like a battering ram. Wobble around like a sailor on leave until you get the feeling back in your legs.

• 9:30-11:00 pm - Drinks with friends or colleagues, if it’s a city where you know people. More revisions and the analgesic of a game you don’t care about on ESPN at a shitty late-night sports bar if not.

• 11:00 pm-12:00 am - Eat Girl Dinner out of the cooler using a washcloth for a napkin and go straight into the shower.

• 12:00-2:30 am - Email, revisions, and PR you didn’t have time for during the day. Fall asleep (or not) obsessing over that question you should have had a better answer for and listening to the particular quality of midnight noise in whatever city you’ve crash-landed in.

Then lather, rinse, repeat for roughly three weeks.

This might make it sound like I’ve had it. On the contrary, I’m having the time of my life. Not every minute of every day, of course, but I stopped trying to keep track of all that in a linear way when I first left Philadelphia. Instead, these long stretches of driving and packing and unpacking and managing the general madness of travel are the closest thing I have to a circadian rhythm and exactly what I need between bouts of furious intellectual gymnastics like, say, doing a book event and a signing line or doing intricate architectural work on a novel seven years in the making which is almost—almost—ready for production. Both those kinds of work come with little floods of adrenaline; when I have to be so on so much of the time, driving is all I’m really good for when I’m “off.” Even if I do that for a lot longer, it doesn’t feel that way. It’s just the rest between sets.

But time is telescoping along another axis, which has something to do with the boom and bust dynamics of publishing. I got a call from my editor after five grueling hours driving circles around road closures for Hurricane Helene and she told me Graveyard Shift had hit several different bestseller lists while I was sitting at the same intersection where I once burst into tears the year I was writing Villains because I was too broke to buy groceries. “Cognitive dissonance” doesn’t quite do it justice. When that book first came out I couldn’t pay anybody to come to an event. We’ve had hundreds of people turn up for this tour, and I’m still astonished every night that there are more full chairs than empty ones. It would actually feel less surreal if this had been my experience from the beginning; this would all be expected. Instead it feels wildly unlikely, like I’ve pulled one over on the world and I’m still waiting for someone realize there’s been a mistake. Oddly that particular manifestation of impostor syndrome has made it so that the only logical way to approach this frenzy is to enjoy it while I can and do everything in my power to make it just as much fun for readers.

Ultimately, the whole reason I pushed myself and everyone on my team so hard to make this happen is that I had a strong but largely groundless conviction that if we built it, people would come. Call it a gut instinct. There’s a lot of naysaying about book events and how they aren’t worth the effort or don’t pay for themselves and end up disappointing all involved, but I simply refuse to accept that as true. What I see from the readers and writers around me is an unflagging, unfailing enthusiasm for books as something to be launched and celebrated and talked about and gathered around. I had a funny feeling we could build a book tour that would make people want to go to another one—mine or anyone else’s. Readers have turned the hell up and walked away saying exactly that.

It’s so cool. I’m so honored. Readers have taken amazing annotations and shown me tattoos and made me bracelets and asked incredibly thoughtful questions I hadn’t even thought of myself. Doing these events is all my favorite parts of acting and teaching and writing all rolled together, but the best part is how many people have told me “I’m here because my friend made me read this book” or “We became friends because of this book.” Because that’s what acting and teaching and writing are all really trying to do, which is establish a meaningful connection. Why wouldn’t we want to have more evenings where the whole point is to talk about how we think and feel about things? The internet has largely replaced the literary salon and even the proverbial watercooler, but it just hits different to gather a bunch of bodies in a room for the sole purpose of trading ideas. It’s all the things that are great about the academy without all the things that suck about the academy. So next time you catch yourself thinking, “Maybe I should apply to graduate school,” remember that’s the devil talking and go to a book event instead.

To be clear, I’m not claiming to have reinvented the book tour. I’m just saying that it’s going to be a fight to keep it alive and I think it’s worth preserving for both selfish and unselfish reasons.

Which doesn’t make it easy. As much fun as this is, it’s also eating me alive. Yes, I like the rhythm of travel, but there are tradeoffs—especially when travel isn’t the only thing I’m doing for work, but just one part of the way too much work I’m always doing all at the same time. Either Graveyard Shift or Hot Wax would have been enough to contend with on their own; splitting my time and attention between the two has exacerbated the aforementioned fugue state. I’m not just running on adrenaline because I’m so hyped about everything, but because the margin of error is so thin that if the right thing goes wrong the whole Jenga tower could come crashing down on my head. Then there’s the huge amorphous anxiety that because I’m touring Graveyard while finishing Hot Wax I’m not doing the best job I could with either and I’m only going to know that for certain once it’s way too late. Weirdly, the fact that the reception of Graveyard has been above and beyond anything anyone expected only makes me more nervous about Hot Wax because, whew. Now the pressure’s really on. (When, pray tell, does it ever ease off? I’ll wait.)

Then there’s the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The things you don’t talk about on the Instagram feed because nobody wants to hear about how your hair’s falling out because hotel shampoo is basically rubbing alcohol or how you haven’t had a vegetable other than iceberg lettuce for a week or how your knees are shot from so much driving and the PT is just one more thing you can’t make time for or how you’re paying an invoice with one bar of service on the side of some highway in Missouri or how you’re trying to make emergency vet appointments for a rescue dog who’s ten states away and they won’t release his prescription information to you, his owner, because you don’t know when his birthday is.

The hardest part, though, is the day where it all just gets to be Too Much, where there’s one extra little something that nudges you over the edge and suddenly it all seems like a huge hassle and you would give your left thumb teleport home and sleep in your own bed and make your own breakfast and have a normal nine-to-five job where you can be still and quiet and basically invisible. Being SEEN so much—not just by readers but by booksellers and hotel employees and diner waitresses and strangers at gas stations and the million and one other people you can’t avoid interacting with when you live in such a state of flux—is exhausting. Some nights you check into a room that reeks of cat litter after a seven-hour drive which should have taken only four and none of your clothes are clean but you have to figure out something to wear because you have to be LIVE, in front of an audience! in roughly thirty minutes and you just want to cry but you can’t because then you’d have to do all your makeup again and you need that 20 minutes to put the finishing touches on Part 2 of your other MS before it goes off to copyedit. Some days you do cry for no real reason and tell your publicist you can’t add anything more to the calendar because your head will explode and then you do it anyway because an opportunity comes along that’s just too good to turn down.

90% of Substack content and writing chatter in general is about how to “make it”: how to get land the agent, get the book deal, break out into the business. We don’t talk as much about what happens after that, because it’s hard to do without sounding like an asshole when so many people are still in the “desperate to get published” phase. But here’s the Catch-22: to be a writer experiencing any degree of success is to live in constant terror of blowing it because you took your eye off the prize for one second. You only get to keep writing so long as you keep selling, which is sort of like saying you only get to keep breathing so long as you keep selling. The competition is fierce and the stakes are high.

Which is maybe why I didn’t pull any punches for this tour. Why I offered to drive myself so we could do more dates. Why I won’t see my dog or my house or my friends or my SO for months. Why I spent of a lot of my advance for Graveyard Shift making swag and prizes and goodie bags for readers, why I’ve been working with four different publishers to bring the party to as many places as we can. Why I’m giving up on sleep hygiene and healthy eating and any time off for the foreseeable future. I’m out here supporting Graveyard Shift and trying to keep book tours alive and hoping to give something back to the readers who have supported me, but I’m also laying track for Hot Wax. Using the momentum we have with this book to give the next one it best shot, so I can maybe keep going and write another one after that. It’s a slow business, yes, but an expansive one. You have to be thinking about that fall 2025 launch well before fall of 2024.

The good news is, I am getting better at this. You learn by doing, and I went headfirst into the deep end about a year ago when I decided to go ahead and try writing as my full-time job. Hard as it’s been to do two books at once while also getting a small business off the ground and moving house and and and, I’m lucky for the chance to take Graveyard Shift out in the world for its own sake and as a kind of dry run for Hot Wax. Because what all this has shown me is that there is a ravenous appetite for this kind of literary communion—beyond the publishing hotspots of the Northeast. Why just keep going when you can go bigger? That’s the real spirit of the Graveyard Shift to Hot Wax era: go big or go home.

Hope to see you out there on the road.