Got up this morning and went to I Love A Mystery, a truly great mystery bookstore in Mission, KS (a suburb of Kansas City.) I was pretty sure there weren't going to be many people there. I was scheduled for a 10:30am "coffee with the author."
I counted 19 people over the course of my showing my slides and talking about my books. That is an excellent turnout. They asked good questions, were great to talk with. They bought plenty of books. What more could an author want?
After that, I hit Stroud's for lunch on my way out of town. The fried chicken's as good as ever. It ought to be, after all, their slogan is, "We choke our own chickens."
Then I lit out west across Kansas, across the Great Plains. A lot of people, when they hear I'm going to drive across Kansas and eastern Colorado, say they feel sorry for me. They make jokes about putting a brick on the gas, tying the wheel straight and napping. They seem to think it is a featureless, dull drive.
They're wrong.
In the Plains, the weather and the light become geographic features of the landscape. The feel of the air is remarkable. Snapping with electricity as storms approach, fresh like nothing else after the storms pass by.
I love driving across the plains. It's one of the things I most look forward to on my Drive-By Book Tours.
Here's the photographic evidence. All shot this afternoon and evening around Oakley, KS - as a storm front passed through. (I did not manipulate any of the color.)
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