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.