It’s July and I’m on the road again. Part vacation and part more Wild Women, Wild Voices book promotion in various locales on the east coast side of the country.
What they tell you about authors being charged with marketing and promoting their own books is true. I’m fortunate that I’m with a publisher who assigned a staff publicist to my book. But promoting my book is my responsibility, too and I’m dropping “Get Your Howl On!” buttons like bread crumbs along the trail.
I named it the Great Pacific Northwest Book Tour and I’ve been on the road just over a week, driving from home in San Diego north on the Interstate first to Oakland for an overnight with my daughter, Amy, before I headed north again for Ashland, Oregon where I had my first book event at Bloomsbury’s Books, and where I got to hang out with my friend Midge Raymond. Midge just shared the good news that her novel, My Last Continent, has been picked up by Scribner! Hooray for Midge. (Midge and her husband, John Yunker run Ashland Creek Press, a small press that publishes gorgeous books with an ecological sensibility.)
This is the second part of the Q&A with my friend Anitra following my return from my month-long writing retreat in Idyllwild, a small mountain community in Southern California. While there I worked on my new book, Wild Women, Wild Voices, which will be out next Spring.
Anitra: Did work come out of that concentrated time that might not have in your normal life? Or did it just come faster because you could concentrate more?
Judy: I definitely got more work done in the concentrated time than I would have at home in my “normal” life. I averaged five or six hours at the writing desk each day, in addition to the reading, research, and notes outside of that. The length of time is not so surprising, but the day-in and day-outness of it is something I don’t have in my life at home.
Because I was able to have that time, and because I was isolated—no distractions—the work stayed alive. Mornings began with pages and pages of journal writing with coffee, and thoughts and ideas and doubts and confirmations about the writing and the project itself filled my journal each morning. At the end of the writing day, I often turned to my journal again to write “outside the story,” threads that developed during the writing that I wanted to explore.