The End of the Tour

I went on a book tour! Now it's over, and I have collapsed. But like King Arthur I shall one day return

A Brakebills bracelet that a lovely person gave me at San Diego Comic-Con. Scroll down for more wonderful things I was given on tour—

It’s thirteen hours from Heathrow to Singapore, give or take, and then another eight from Singapore to Sydney, which is a lot of time, but still not enough for me to fully process the experience of publishing a book and then traveling around for a month talking about it.

Really it’s the kind of experience that ought to be spread evenly over several years, possibly decades, instead of which it gets compressed into one single neutron-star of a month. I suppose it’s the cicada-like life-cycle of the author: after years of dormancy we emerge, wing-cases gleaming, darken the sky in our droves, make as much noise as possible, then lay our eggs and collapse, and our bodies helpfully fertilize the soil for future generations.

(To be more medically accurate, I’m in bed with monster jet lag and a heavy cold, which may account for the slight incoherence of this post.)

A friend in London gave me this gorgeous hand-lettered Brakebills diploma. (I was also given beautiful fan art on the tour, but it seems too personal to post here.)

I find tours quite psychically challenging—I’m very dependent on my family to stabilize my sense of who I am, and when they’re not around I get out of plumb pretty quickly. I start paying too much attention to sales and reviews and bestseller and best-of lists, and whether or not bookstores are displaying my books (I’m looking at you, Trafalgar Square Waterstones). This leads me down deep rabbit-holes of narcissism and pettiness.

(An interesting side note: the bestseller-list game has gotten a lot harder since the last time I played it. In 2014 The Magician’s Land hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list—a and possibly the highlight of my career. The Bright Sword, while it’s selling approximately as well as The Magician’s Land, didn’t even scrape into last place on the Times list. Though it has consistently been on the Indie Bestseller List .)

But it’s all worth it. In fact even to say that is a massive understatement. I never forget that it’s a tremendous privilege to have the publisher support and the general life-circumstances that make it possible for me to go on a tour. I was an unsuccessful writer for a long, long time. I never dreamed I would get to this place in my life.

Plus staying in hotels, even the occasional lousy one, is my jam. In my mind I am always James Bond checking into the Bolivar Hotel in Quantum of Solace, against explicit instructions from MI6. I am a schoolteacher on sabbatical, and I have just won the lottery.

Me

Just the chance to meet other writers—I don’t actually know that many writers personally, in my civilian life, but I read all the time, and there are a lot of people with whom I’ve spent many, many hours of my life silently and one-sidedly communing, and now I’ve just spent a month actually meeting and talking with at least a dozen of them. I think I committed social gaffes in front of literally every single one. Believe me, I get as starstruck as anybody else when I meet a great writer.

A present from Worldcon in Glasgow

I also had the privilege of meeting a lot of readers, which is incredibly important. I don’t write for myself, I write for an audience, but I rarely actually see that audience. It’s tough to read the room when there is no room. But at events and conventions I get to actually be in a room with readers, and see what they respond to, hear them talk about what matters to them, see who they actually are. People give me things, and spin theories about things, and tell me what they’re reading and watching and playing.

A tiny replica of The Bright Sword—from Nashville, if I’m remembering right

Later, when I’m back in my spacious studylaundry room, I still think about them—about you—the people I met and signed books for, who asked questions, who showed me their tattoos, even the people I never spoke to but who did me the tremendous honor of turning up and sitting in the audience. Now I’m back in my cicada-hole, back in larval form. But I haven’t forgotten you.