How Can You Be in Two Places At Once When You’re Nowhere At All?
(Title stolen from The Firesign Theatre)
I love doing book tours.
I hate traveling.
This may seem like a contradiction, but it’s really not. Book tours require travel, which I hate. (More on that in a moment.) But they also mean I get to go out and meet people, especially people who like my books, and to see places I don’t often get to see or have never seen before. When I’m on a book tour, someone may come up to me and say, “I saw you the last time you were here, in 20-ought-whenever,” or “back in the 90s”, and all of a sudden a door in my memory opens. Occasionally it’s because I suddenly remember the person who approached, other times it’s that I remember a place or a time that had slid right out of my overworked brain.
(Overworked and underpaid, my brain is, at least in terms of the green, leafy vegetables I should be giving it. My wife was a vegetarian for years and still thinks vegetables first when meal planning. As for me, I try to eat vegetables from time to time. You can see the difference between the two approaches, and why my brain despises me. But I’m slowly improving, and by the time I die, I will probably be eating at least one healthy thing every day. Which reminds me, are Cheez-It snack crackers healthy? Asking for a friend.
Anyway, back to the traveling/touring paradox. This is on my mind because I’m going on a (quite short) tour starting in a few days, mostly American West Coast stops. Although a limited trip, any tour is good thing — I haven’t done any official touring in America for a long time. So I’m happy about that. And, as I said, I have hundreds of reasons to like being out on tour. For one thing, as my wife Deborah Beale often points out, I’m going out to meet people who, I know before I even arrive, are mostly there because they like to read the books I write. Right away, that’s a warm feeling, as you can imagine. And I get to talk to actual live people, which is not something I commonly do most days. (I make this up at home by babbling endlessly to the dogs and cats and even myself. Poor Deborah!) And I get to tell stories, which is obviously the thing I like to do almost the best in the whole world. Deborah refers to this as me “doing stand-up”, as in comedy, and there’s some truth to it. Not because I consider myself a comedian, but because I do enjoy occasionally making people laugh. (As opposed to the strangers laughing and pointing at me in the street, which is a different and much less enjoyable experience.)
I have been to so many bookstores and libraries in my life that I could not even make a guess as to the numbers. Seriously. And, crazily enough, I still enjoy every bookstore and library I ever enter, even after all this time. And I still love meeting my readers, even after forty years of doing so — probably more now than when I started. For one thing, they are all very, very clever and likable people. No, it’s true! Either I have just completely lucked out, or something in my work attracts really nice folks. The kindness and attention I get when I’m traveling is so heartening that I almost feel guilty. During my last long sojourn touring Germany, for instance, I kept saying, “Hey, am I dying from something and nobody’s telling me? Because everyone is being suspiciously nice.” Honestly, it feels like that sometimes. I suppose it’s a kind of impostor syndrome, which is weird, because I don’t have that in any other form. I know I put a huge amount of time and work into my books, and I think I’m reasonably good at it, so it’s not a surprise that others might like what I do, and by extension, me. But the immense kindness and generosity I get from meeting people when I’m on tour almost feels unreasonable. I keep wanting to say, “I’m actually pretty boring, you know. Trust me. After all, I live with me.”
And that is the other part of the paradox. Other writers may be swanning around the world like secret agents, finding love and danger and all that, but even in the midst of my most life-affirming moments with readers and old friends, there is a large (and boring) part of me that wants to be home.
I’m really a hobbit. That’s all. My feet may not be overly furry, and I stand a towering five-foot-ten inches tall (even Bullroarer Took wouldn’t mess with me) but an important part of me is just a home-loving lump. I love being with my wife and whichever of our kids happen to be around. I love and am constantly amused and moved by the animals that live with us, as well as those critters who live in the woods around us. I can sit fascinated by my downstairs office glass door, watching rabbits and quail and the occasional deer pick their way across the property, trying to stay really still so I don’t scare them away. I love hanging with Deb outside, listening to the birds at the end of the day. I love having everything where I can find it, even though any sane observer would say it looked like someone had attacked my desk with a trash-seeking missile. Nobody understands that my clutter is Secretly Organized. (It’s real because I gave it capital letters.)
Fairly obviously, as I get older I am also more impatient with inconvenience, and it is impossible to travel without finding occasional inconveniences — things forgot, things that were left back in the last hotel, things that I can’t solve when I need to because I haven’t got the app and my passwords are at home. You know, modern life on the road.
I’m not just hobbity, though. I also remind myself of Mole from Wind in the Willows. He too is drawn away from his home ground with promises of delights to be found in the wide world, and indeed he finds them, just like I do when I’m traveling and meet all those excellent people and see those excellent places. But after a point, Mole realizes he truly misses his little underground home, and almost weeps when he finds it again after many weeks away, and is angry with himself for forgetting its humble charms and leaving it so long.
The Splintered Sun will also be available in a Special Edition from UK speciality publisher THE BROKEN BINDING. You can pre-order your copy HERE.
That’s not too much of a worry this time — I’m only traveling for about a week. And the trip will doubtless fly by, with all kinds of genuinely heart-warming moments, so that I scarcely have time to worry about how Deb and the animals are doing without me. I truly have one of the best jobs in the world, and get to share my work with many excellent people, and even be praised and petted by them. But I will always feel my mole-burrow/hobbit hole calling to me, telling me, “You are too far away! Come back! You belong here!”
So, as you can see, a bit of a paradox, love to tour, hate to travel. But, thank goodness, the human mind, the most complicated system in the universe that we know of, can hold two separate and seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time. Even mine, despite its current age and its dubious early stages. So nobody has to feel sorry for me when we meet. Yes, I’ll be happy when I go home again, but in the interim I will be enjoying every minute.
THE SPLINTERED SUN BOOK TOUR
New York Times bestselling author Tad Williams is going on a West Coast tour! We hope to see you there!
Launch Event in Beaverton, OR:
Tuesday, 10/6 at 7 pm, in conversation with Brent Weeks, New York Times bestselling author of Night Angel Nemesis, at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
Bellingham, WA:
Wednesday, 10/7 at 6 pm at Village Books in Fairhaven
Lake Forest, WA:
Thursday, 10/8 at 7 pm, in conversation with Shawn Speakerman, author of The King-Killing Queen, at Third Place Books
Salt Lake City, UT:
Sunday, 10/11 at 5:30 pm, in conversation with Lynn Buchanan, author of Breeze Felt at Moonrise at The King’s English Bookshop
San Diego, CA:
Monday, 10/12 at 7 pm, Q&A moderated by Rishali Dey, @thecozy.tbr, at Mysterious Galaxy