A quick note on fall events, an about-to-be published novel called THE BELLES, and my last minute adventure to the Pawnee National Grasslands

I’ve spent the last three weeks thinking it was the beginning of August (and for part of that time, I was correct), but this morning I looked at my watch and couldn’t believe what I saw. August 25. September is next week? How did that happen?

(one of the Pawnee Buttes at the Pawnee National Grasslands… see story below)

Somehow this summer flew by even faster than last summer, but fall is my favorite season and I’m more than ready for temperatures to live below 90 degrees on the thermometer. And in good news for me, September and October are filled with fun book events.

In my last post, I mentioned I’d be doing some touring with the amazing Kerry Nichols, author of the best-selling Puppy Brain. We did our first event together in July in Santa Monica, and had so much fun together! As planned, we talked about our books and the unexpected overlap between them, but we also enjoyed discussing second acts and what it’s like to start over and grow through a new career phase. (You can check out an excerpt that Kerry posted here.) We have three more bookstore events together this September, and since we’ll be traveling together, I think this will be a hoot. Two writers on the loose… If you’re in the area, please join us! The events are as follows:

September 14, 3:00pm, Waterstreet Bookstore in Exeter, NH (free event/no ticket required, but email me if you’re coming as it’s fun to know who I’ll get to see)

September 15, 7:00pm, Hummingbird Books in Boston, MA (tickets available here and include a copy of either Penitence or Puppy Brain).

September 18, 6:30pm, Bedford Books in Bedford, NY (tickets available here and include a $20 gift certificate to use towards Penitence, Puppy Brain, or anything else in the store)

I’ll also be appearing at some terrific book festivals this fall, so if you’re in any of these areas, I’d love to see you:

September 21, 6:00pm, Berthoud Literary Festival (Berthoud, CO, tickets available here)

September 27, time tbd, Jackson Hole Book Festival (Jackson Hole, WY, free event, registration here)

September 28, 10:00am, Aspen Literary Festival (Aspen, CO, free event)

October 18-19, time tbd, Southern Festival of Books (Nashville, TN)

In addition to having fun thinking about these upcoming events for Penitence, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on Book #2, and I love immersing myself in the heads of new people—let’s call them ‘Baby Characters’—and I’m very interested to see where they take me. So far, I’m on a very different journey than what I prepared for, and I’m starting to wonder whether each new book will feel like a new act. So… wish me luck on this THIRD act?!?

WHAT I’M READING: I’m doing something fun—my dear writing friend Lacey Dunham is publishing her debut novel THE BELLES on September 9th. I read a draft of this novel two years ago, and it was already excellent (intriguing, fun, mysterious). Since then, she’s worked on it tirelessly, and I can’t wait to read the revised version. The copy I pre-ordered doesn’t arrive until 9/9, but I’m curious to see what she did to make an already excellent book even better, so I’m re-reading that last draft before I read the published version so I’ll be able to see what’s changed and learn how to improve an already excellent novel. THE BELLES is dark academia meets southern gothic in this chilling mashup of Mean Girls, Heathers, and The Secret History and has received so much advance praise from critics—look it up, and consider pre-ordering a copy instead of waiting to pick it up in stores. The publishing industry places a lot of importance on how many pre-orders a book has (yes, it is strange) so when I know I’m going to read a book, I always try to support the author by pre-ordering it.

WHAT I’M WATCHING: I can’t wait for Season 3 of The Diplomat to come out this fall, but in the meantime I’m watching Scandal, which I just discovered.

WHAT I’M GRATEFUL FOR: Rain, rain, rain! Did you know Colorado only gets 14 inches of precipitation annually? Since most of that comes in the form of snow, our cozy rainy days are few and far between, and today was one of them.

WHY I LIVE AND DIE BY RANDOM ADVENTURES: After giving a talk in the library in Fort Morgan (a town on the Colorado plains best known for the last working sugar beet mill in CO), I figured I was 90 minutes closer to the Pawnee National Grasslands than I normally am, so I decided to drive another 90 minutes to get there. Google maps took me on mostly dirt roads (though truthfully, that might be all that exists in out there) and I was racing against time since it was almost sunset, but other than two pickups going the other way, it was just me and the pronghorn antelope and it was breathtaking. Eventually, the google gods drove me down a one lane gravel road into a parking lot for a fracking operation. I could see the Pawnee Buttes I was trying to reach, but the actual entrance was definitely elsewhere. I took a picture, resolved to return someday with more time and a camera to take a nighttime picture of the Milky Way, and beat a hasty retreat before the secret cameras guarding the fracking operation disclosed my presence and drew out an angry man with a shotgun. The rolling grasslands were beautiful and empty and surprisingly green and the last light of the day pinking up the distant buttes made it all worthwhile—even if I had to eat the peanut M&Ms in my glove compartment for dinner because there were no restaurants, stores, or even gas stations to buy anything else. Highly recommend.