WORLD PREMIER

This coming March 2, at 7 p.m., world-class booksellers Linda Ramsdell and Sandy Scott, of the fabled Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, VT, will be hosting the WORLD PREMIER of the Great American Book Tour for my new Civil War novel, Walking to Gatlinburg. Thank you Linda and Sandy!

Then it’s off to the races for this clueless writer, with visits to more than 100 towns and cities over the next several months. Whew! It begs the question: Do book tours really work?

Yes, they do. Besides selling books – and there are, after all, worse things to peddle than novels – my coast-to-coast book tours are a wonderful break from the isolation of fiction writing. Walking to Gatlinburg took more years to write and went through more drafts than I care to remember. Time for a change.

The title of the slide show I’ll be doing for my book tour this time around is “Transforming History into Fiction: the Story of a Born Liar.” Touring, however, gives this storywriter a chance, for once in his life, to tell the unvarnished truth. To the readers, booksellers, and librarians who keep us lying-through-our-teeth novelists going, please let me say, “Thank you. I appreciate it!”

I’ll be keeping a journal of the Great American Book Tour – which also happens to be the title of my next book, a memoir coming soon from Shaye Areheart Books – on this Blog. Some of it – I promise – will even be true.