Apparently all the travel I did this spring has aged me, because this summer I’ve been occupied with all kinds of old-lady diversions, like canning jam, watching Downton Abbey, and obsessing over ancient family history. Okay, maybe a couple of those things have been appropriated by the young hipstersnappers of today, but if I’m supposed to feel cool poking jar lids and analyzing Lady Edith’s love life, it’s not working.

So far I’ve put up two batches of strawberry jam that just might be botulism-free! I’ve wanted to try canning for a few years now, even before I embarked on my various Little House lifestyle experiments, and then after I helped make some pickles and apple butter with some friends a couple years ago I really dug it. I think this wound up being the year to finally do it on my own because 1.) I churned a lot of useless for-demonstration-only butter at my book events this spring and it made me want to do something actually halfway practical for a change 2.) Reading all those wedding style blogs last summer gave me a weird fetish for mason jars that our not-very-DIY and decidedly unPinteresting wedding could not indulge. Anyway, I’m acting on these urges until I run out of lids or patience.

Chris and I are almost done with Season Two of Downton, which is getting so soapy (the soap being a fine sort of Yardley of London lavender stuff, obviously) that we will be pretty disappointed if no evil twins show up by the finale. Seriously, think of all the shit that could be started by a new, evil, mustachioed head butler named “Larson.” And how is it that seven years have gone by in series time and yet all three daughters are still somehow between the ages of eighteenish and not-quite-spinsterish? Not that it matters.

And then, in my oldish age, I’ve guess I’ve gone and started a family history blog. I know, your eyes are glazing over now, but this past winter while visiting my dad I somehow managed to open this crazy King Tut vault of old photos, letters, and scrapbooks leading me to things that I never really knew about my mother’s family, like the fact that I had two great-great-grandfathers who worked and lived at a Texas insane asylum and a great-great-uncle who was on Dark Shadows. It turns out I need an outlet for all this, a place to put these sepia photos of dead people whose faces I’m learning to know; a reason to go find the places where they used to live.

I suppose that after tracing the steps of the Ingalls family for so long it was time I did the same with my actual family, which is how I wound up walking around in the rain for two hours in New York last month trying to find places in the backgrounds of photos like this one:

That’s my great-grandmother, sometime in the late 1930s, and the building—I found it!—is in Brooklyn Heights. I barely know anything about her, and I suppose that’s why I felt I had to find the location.

Anyway, that’s the new obsession, and no, I don’t know quite what I’m doing with it yet.

*   *  *

I’m headed off later this week to Minnesota, which will include a couple days in Minneapolis visiting a friend and a couple of days at LauraPalooza 2012, where I’ll be signing books Thursday night. If you’ll be there, please say hello and allow me to draw you a dorky Hollie Hobbie picture in a copy of my book.

If you couldn’t get to an event this spring I have a couple of audio souvenirs from the Wilder Life paperback tour: first, the amazingly fun Live Wire episode I taped in Portland, and then a piece for the Writer’s Block podcast that I recorded at KQED in San Francisco. In both instances I read parts from the book that I don’t usually perform otherwise, so check them out.

Summer is just about here, and my paperback book tour is just about over, though I do have a little more fun happening in June—one event out of town and one here in Chicago:

Next weekend is my talk for the Harford County Public Library in Maryland. It’s this Saturday at 6:30 pm at the branch in Bel Air. I’ll be talking about the book and my experiences for the Smithsonian Journey Stories. The event is free and open to the public.

Then the following Friday, June 8th, I’ll be the author guest at the Much Ado About Tap Literacy Works fundraiser at the National Museum of Mexican Art here in Chicago. It starts at 6pm and there will be beer, dance, local food and more! You purchase tickets for this one, and it’s for a great cause.

 After these, I may be doing an event here and there (including the authors’ reception at LauraPalooza 2012), but for the most part I’m looking forward to spending, with Chris, the first relatively laid-back summer we’ve had in years. See you at the beach! Or the beer garden. Or the drive-in. For once I have a bucket list that doesn’t involve a replica log cabin and I swear I don’t know what to do with myself.

(At Larkin and Turk streets, San Francisco, 2005)

So tomorrow I fly out to Austin to start the Wilder Life paperback book tour, and from there I go on to San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, and Portland. I’ve never been to Austin before (no, not even to that SXSW thing), but it turns out my great-great-grandparents lived there for a while, right across from the Capitol in a big white house, and are now buried in Oakwood Cemetery, so I’ll have to pay them a brief visit before I read at BookPeople.

As for the West Coast events, I’ll be at two of the same bookstores I visited in 2005 when I’m Not the New Me came out, in Seattle and Portland. That trip was my very first taste of book tour life, seven years ago this month, and there are all these things that I want to remember about it before I go out there and experience it all again. First there was the launch reading in Chicago, where afterwards I’d gone out to the Double Door and met some guy named Chris. We’d started exchanging emails the next day, and we probably would have gone on a first date that same week if I hadn’t been going out of town.

The trip wasn’t a full-fledged book tour, just a few bookstore and media appearances that my publisher wrangled after I let them know I’d be in Seattle for a work conference (in other words, the flight and hotel were already taken care of). I had a day or two to myself after the conference and I spent it hanging around the city—one day I figured out the bus system so I could go get a haircut up in Capitol Hill, another day I went to Pike Place Market and bought a copy of The San Francisco Chronicle at a newsstand because I’d been told the paper was covering my book. I sat in a bakery at the market and ate breakfast and read the review written by this woman named Jami, who would later be my friend Jami.

The publisher sent a town car one morning to take me to do a local TV morning show appearance, and on the way back to my hotel the driver stopped at a cafe so I could run in and get coffee. People in the cafe kept looking out the window at the big black car waiting outside, and at me as I waited in line. “Are you… someone?” the girl at the counter asked, really tentatively. No, I told her.

The next day the car took me out to Third Place Books, where I was relieved to find that most of the chairs they’d set out for the event were filled. The booksellers (one of them also named Wendy I think) told me that Jane Fonda had done an event there earlier that week, and that the big unopened bottle of extra-nice Fiji water waiting for me on the podium had been Jane’s water, specially requested, but she hadn’t touched it. Of course I was thrilled, and then I guess a few sips of the Jane Fonda water must have emboldened me, because suddenly, right there in front of the audience, I decided to call this Chris guy that I’d met back in Chicago. Well, prank-call him, that is. I called him on my cell phone and when he answered I asked him if his refrigerator was running. He said yes, and I held out the phone to the audience, who yelled, THEN GO CATCH IT! Then I hung up as fast as I could and turned the phone off.

After the reading at Third Place, the big black car drove through the night to Portland because I had morning TV there the next day to promote my event at Powell’s. I met my media escort at 6am in the lobby of the hotel where I’d barely slept. The escort told me the TV show was live with a studio audience, so I sat in the green room feeling anxious and a little sick. But as I watched the show on the monitor, a segment came on about some new kind of cellulite treatment, and the news crew was visiting some spa and filming a woman in a leotard lying face down on a spa table while spa technicians were using these crazy rolling pins on the backs of her thighs. She was being interviewed as she lay there, the camera panning from her backside up to her face and then back again, and I thought, well, whatever happens to me on live TV, at least I’m not Roller Butt Lady. Then I went out to do my segment, and the studio audience turned out to be just a set of bleachers and a very sweet Cub Scout troop, and that was even better.

A couple months after that I flew back out west for two events in California, traveling mostly on my own dime. First I read in LA, where only about three people showed up, and then when I arrived in San Francisco I discovered I’d shown up the day before Pride Weekend, and the courtyard of the cool little hotel I’d picked was taken over by a massive private party hosted by drag queens. Again I had a few days to myself before my book event; at night I’d have long I-miss-you phone calls with Chris, who by now was my boyfriend Chris, and during the days I’d wander around seeing the city, and meeting with folks like Kevin and the women at Bitch magazine helped ward off the homesickness. Finally I did my event at the now-sadly defunct A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, and it was so much fun I didn’t even mind when the folding podium collapsed. By then I’d done a dozen events, and over twenty radio interviews by phone, and I was getting used to all of it, being slightly rumpled, and drinking other people’s water, and smiling graciously when people mistake you for someone.

So now I’m doing so much of it again—the Bay Area (two new places for me, Bookshop West Portal and A Great Good Place for Books), the drive through the night from Seattle to Portland, the incredibly short hotel stay (this time in Seattle), Third Place, Powell’s, the morning TV sutff.  I’ll see Jami in Austin because it turns out she’s there right now, too, and her new book, which you will hear about, is coming out soon. And then Chris is flying out Tuesday to join me for the rest of the trip, and we’ll get to see everything I was telling him about during those first few months seven years ago, everything that I wanted to show him back then. And we’ll see you, too.

I did not join the Russian mafia. I know, I know, I had this weird site hack last month, where the page would load and then redirect so that suddenly you’d be reading a page that would be all YOU WANT GET RICH?! YOU WORK FROM HOME!! IS GOOD SYSTEM!!! I contacted Jennette, who went into the site databases and found that they were all seething with malware, so she hosed everything down with cyberbleach and I think the hack is finally banished, thank goodness.

And while all kinds of Cyrillic scams were going on here this winter (excuse me, “winter,” since the proverbial Chinook started blowing when, like late February?) I was finishing up the special short ebook I wrote to coincide with tomorrow’s paperback release of The Wilder Life. Yes! Tomorrow! I’m telling you!  Except plugging my own stuff always feels a little awkward in a way that makes me almost (almost) wish that this site was still infested with pushy entrepreneurial Russians, because then I could leave the promotional stuff up to them. YOU WANT MORE BOOK?! YOU BUY RIVERHEAD E-SPECIAL!!! IS BARGAIN PRICE!!!

They could also handle the heart-breakingly hard-to-answer comments on the Facebook page that were coming from folks who really want the ebook special to not be an ebook (BUT THEN IS NOT SPECIAL) so they can keep it in their Little House collections (SO SORRY IS NOT FRANKLIN MINT).

But obviously I’m the only one here, so it’s up to me to explain. All I can say is that I had so much fun working on Don’t Trade the Baby for a Horse, and being able to publish it as an ebook was what made it possible in the first place. Nearly a year after The Wilder Life first came out, I got to revisit one of my favorite subjects in the whole universe, write about stuff that I didn’t have a chance to cover in TWL, write about things that happened after it came out, and resolve that nagging regret that out of all the Little House-related activities I did for my book, I’d never managed to discover what it was like blowing up a pig bladder balloon. Of course, now I seriously regret finding out. But it had to be done.

I’m grateful that when TWL came out last year, so many people chose it as a hardcover: it was one of those books that was meant to be three hundred pages long, to be published with a jacket and foil stamping on the spine; the kind of book that needs months and months of advance preparation before it even comes out. Don’t Trade the Baby is not one of those books—it’s a little book, though it is round and strong!—and I’m grateful that I can still publish it and not worry about things like sell-through and returns and earning out. (Though I won’t make a dime on the especial unless copies are sold, which is a trade-off I was willing to try.) Anyway, that’s the story.

I will admit that it’ll be a little weird not being able to autograph copies of DTTBFAH (I did scrawl on the back of a Kindle once, which was strange). I’m thinking about getting some letterpress bookmarks made for LauraPalooza to give to people who have bought the e-special. And if you come to one of the paperback tour events this month, I’ll be happy to sign by proxy any card you can bring, or else any sunbonnet, tin cup, log, china shepherdess, corn cob doll, copy of Millbank, wooden slate, hardtack slab, button-string, iron spider, butter paddle, haystick, or snow-white-gleaming jewel box with a wee gold-colored teapot and a gold-colored tiny cup in a gold-colored saucer on the lid. Because objects are still important.

I’ll tell you a little more on the paperback tour later this week, but for now, I leave you with these:

YOU BUY $2.99!! IS GOOD PRICE!!!

YOU WANT PAPERBACK BOOK?! NOW IS ON SALE!!

Hotel rooms occupied: 13

Flights taken: 19

Rental cars driven: 3

Roughly estimated number of book events: 21

Attendees at first Barnes & Noble event: 5

Attendees at second Barnes & Noble event: 125

Total pounds of butter churned at book events: about 4

Percentage of above flushed down hotel room toilets: 20

Estimated number of times Chris had to carry the butter churn to or from the car: 8

Public churning failures, attributed either to the half & half instead of cream or to improperly sealed container: 2

Pieces of storeboughten candy distributed at book events (approximately): 450

Instances in which I trekked down to WBEZ studios to remotely record content for public radio: 4

Instances in which I had to conduct a live radio interview via cell phone in a NYC cab stuck in traffic on the Willamsburg Bridge: 1

Words in The Wilder Life, not including front and back matter: 98,547

Words in The Wilder Life that are legally considered profanity, according to FCC guidelines: 3

Words in The Wilder Life legally considered profanity occuring in a quote attributed to Michael Landon: 1

Written complaints about “excessive profanity” in The Wilder Life, either by Amazon reviews or handwritten letters: 3

Highest Amazon sales rank: 104

Books ordered for relatives in fruitless attempt to bump sales rank into coveted top 100: 2

Seconds the animatronic figure of William Clark at the Museum of Western Expansion in St. Louis spends twitching: 25

YA manuscripts considered at day job: 41

Yards of bubble wrap accompanying wedding presents, estimated: 25

Minor finger injuries sustained while making brooch bouquet: 7,200

People who misheard the phrase “brooch bouquet” as “roach bouquet”: 5

People at our wedding who asked us, “Wow, who’s that guy with the kilt?” (It was Eben!): 8

Requests I have made to my husband to sing like Gordon Lightfoot: 11

Hours of delight this video, involving weird perspective and a very tiny complimentary soap in our hotel room in Minneapolis, has brought our household: MILLIONS:

I’ll stop here because I don’t think I could make a list long enough to convey what an incredible year 2011 has been.

And here’s to 2012—”this is now,” as they say, and may your now be a happy one.

Two things I need for you to do:

1.) If you dug The Wilder Life and are on Goodreads (or would like to be on Goodreads), you have until Sunday the 20th to vote for it in the first rounds of the Goodreads Choice Awards, where it is a nominee in the Memoir/Autobiography category. I don’t think I actually win anything and I know having to choose between me and Nikki Sixx puts you in a tough spot, but I hope you’ll vote this week.

2.) My last book-related event of 2011 (out of nearly twenty!) will be a benefit for Literacy Works Chicago on Monday, December 5th, at the Hopleaf. We’re going for a Little House Christmas (for grown-ups) theme, and it’ll be much more festive than a book-signing. If you’re in Chicago, this is a great opportunity to hang out in that upstairs room at the Hopleaf for a good cause. So, come if you can! (Downloadable PDF with all the info here.)

Five things I’ve been doing since my last blog entry:

1.) Reading your young adult novel manuscript: Well, maybe not YOUR young adult novel manuscript, but there are a lot of people out there whose agents have sent me YA manuscripts, and I’m reading the hell out of them. (The rest of you ought to be working on YAnovel manuscripts this month, right?)

2.) Getting hitched. See below:

Yeah, that was fun. The September weather was perfect, and my brooch bouquet did not fall apart, though it weighed a ton (and no, I did not toss it). Every day, for nearly two months now, I consider two incontrovertible facts: First, that the wedding was wonderful and it went far beyond our expectations and second, we do not have to plan it anymore. Chris and I are SO FREAKING GLAD.

3.) Traveling for the next three weekends after the wedding and subsequently recovering from all the travel. What were we thinking? Although one of the weekends was a stay at a Lake Geneva resort, where about sixteen other weddings were taking place on the grounds around us and it happily reminded us that WE WERE DONE WITH OUR WEDDING and could sit around in comfy clothes reading novels (published ones, not manuscripts).

4.) Writing an adventure story for This American Life. Hot zig! I have always wanted to be a contributor and I got the chance to do it last month. The episode is here, and my piece is in Act Two. (My piece was inspired by children’s time-travel stories, like this insane serial in a 1960s Boys’ Life magazine.)

5.) Preparing for winter: I keep hearing that the coming season is going to be a massive snowmageddon winterpocalypse of coldastrophic proportions. There aren’t any muskrat houses in my neighborhood that I can check, but I suspect that the regular, non-musk rats around here are scurrying more and building bigger garbage nests in anticipation. At any rate, I’m getting kind of excited/paranoid and wanting to TAKE ACTION about this. I’ve replaced the tires and battery on the car (okay, which I needed to do anyway, but I feel better and even a little righteous about spending the money, knowing that the car will be in much better shape to face the coming of the SnowAntiChrist), bought a new parka, and am looking for new snow boots (recommendations, please!), and racking my brain for more things Chris and I can do or buy to give us the smug satisfaction of being ready when the time comes and the Evil Snow Empire descends. Shouldn’t we get batteries? Candles? DVDs of stylish 50s melodramas? Yes, yes, and yes.