So I’m writing from New Orleans, from a gorgeous little bed and breakfast with fans whirring overhead, gleaming wooden floors, and French doors leading out to a pool with many many plants draped sluttishly over it. It’s sooo beautiful here. I love this city with all my heart, or what’s left of it, despite the mosquitoes as big as helicopters that have ravaged my legs and soul. We’ve been here since Thursday, wandering around and drinking wine and having lovely meals in romantical places with balconies and tin ceilings. I really feel that New Orleans is the city equivalent to Garbo languishing in Camille, in elegantly doomed fashione.

Today we’re renting a car and heading out to the swamps. Yesterday was my book reading at Octavia Books and, well, it was an extremely lovely event for me, my four friends, and the very charming owners of the very charming store, but I’m afraid the rest of the city was busy donning itself in Halloween gear and playing hard to get. We ended up all hanging out in an empty store as it grew dark outside, and I signed all the copies of my book stock and read to the six of them. It was a bit of a relief, since I’ve been so nervous about reading and public speaking, and it was homespun and sweet, like sitting around a campfire telling tales. I do hope that the Philly event next weekend is slightly better attended, however, or else I might start to feel unadored!

Also, this is my new favorite band: http://www.elradiofantastique.com/. Tomorrow night they will be playing at the coolest club in the city, with trapeze girls trapezing alongside them, but alas we will be on a plane heading hooommee.

So yesterday I met my friend David, and we were glamorously drinking wine and talking when something I said made him mention this early 20th century comic called Little Nemo in Slumberland. I'd never heard of it, so he whisked me into a cab and to St. Mark's Bookstore. I thought it would just be some little comic thing that he was all nerdily excited about, but then he had the clerk pull down this massive full-color oversize book I could barely carry, and we went to the Starbucks across the street for me to read it. I was completely blown away. I opened that thing and started crying. It's one of the most magical and gorgeous things I've ever seen, and I had this weird intense gut reaction, like my secret childhood had just been busted open and splattered on a page. It's just.. amazing. Every night this boy has these intense dreams filled with the most wild and wonderful things, just beautiful weird amazing things, and every episode ends with him waking up and falling back into the world again. It's charming and heartbreaking and gorgeous and disturbing, just mindblowing, but it also made me feel like I was staring at a part of myself that is hidden away, if yoo know what I meaaann. But I suppose the best things do that.

In other news, I believe that my reading in San Francisco will include performers from the Circus Center--either actually performing or showing videos of performances--and I will very likely have an event at the Circus Center itself. In January I will probably have a reading at the studio of these women, in Brattleboro, Vermont. That is the coolest event: it will be intimate and small, they'll do a performance on the trapeze, and I'll read a trapeze scene from my novel. Lovely!

Tomorrow we take off for New Orleans, where I have my first bookstore reading on Saturday. Wedged in between visits to swamps and plantations and voodoo priests, of course, which frankly I believe should be true of all readings, generally.

I keep a journal at livejournal.com, and have for 500000 years, but now that I have a new website and a new book I felt it was time to start a spanking-new one in a whole new place. It is like an illicit affair! I hope livejournal doesn't notice that I've begun paying more attention to my hairdo and have been visiting the manicurist regularly.

I do have to relay the following experience: my heart cracked open yesterday when I finally finally saw the real, final, hardcover version of my book. It is so beautiful. Far more lovely than I would have thought. In the next week or two you must go visit a bookstore and at least admire it. Fondle it, wink at it, tell it it's pretty. Check out the gorgeous spine and peel back the paper to look at the bare book itself, the title alluringly engraved in a shimmery turquoise blue. Flip the book over and admire my pink-lined author photo, the misty circus scene on the back cover. Oh, it is a siren!!

Look!! http://www.unbridledbooks.com/page/rain-village