It's true, it's Monday, and we are back in Chicago. We had this idea that following our Saturday readings, be they great successes or Book Revue like implosions we would report to all of you on Saturday night from New York and be all cute and title the entry "Live from New York, It's Saturday night." Alas, we stayed out at Dillingers in downtown Binghamton until 2:15am and could not muster the strength to do so upon our return home.
As spokesperson, however, I am happy to report that the readings were great and many, many thanks to our hosts Gary at the Bookery II and John and Tony at Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts because I had a lot of fun and I am very grateful for the opportunity to lower the literary bar at their fine establishments with the endless morass of pop culture, arrested development, and dysfunction we like to bring to our readings.
When we got to Ithaca for the first reading I not only immediately saw the Ithaca Times with its two-page Lucky Man interview all over town, but a big-ass poster hyping the reading in the Ithaca Commons. Nice. There was then a nice post-Harry Potter, counter-programming kind of turnout at the Bookery II (thank you mom, Steve and Cheryl, Don, and Chuck among others), rife with insightful questions asked, several of which came from Gary himself, a lover of writers and books like few I've met on this recent Lucky Man world tour, and like six books sold, leaving Gary with but two autographed copies for the store. Not bad.
Later, we headed to Binghamton, where the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin had already given us a nice write-up on Friday, and I had the chance to read before 38 people, a mix of high school and college friends, family friends, and people who thought we just might have something interesting to say. It was standing room only and we moved nine out of the ten copies of the book we had with us, thank you Binghamton.
I would add, that while in Ithaca we also read an excerpt from the draft of the new novel "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine," which was also fun, and seemingly well-received, but kind of weird as well, as we felt almost disloyal to Lucky Man. It struck us at Lucky Man, Inc. that with no upcoming readings or interviews scheduled, this reading might represent our initial transition from one novel to the next as our focus here at "This Blog Will Change Your Life," and while we are not quite ready for that, and while we like to think Lucky Man has legs, you know like My Big Fat Greek Wedding or the Eagles Greatest Hits, we will need to see what happens.
It should be noted, that this feeling of almost necessary transition was heightened, by our rapidly descending, or is it ascending, but in a bad way, Amazon ranking, which had reached a new low of 981,000 as of this morning. We had wondered if we might not reach a million not sold, kind of cool, albeit lame, when an odd thing happened later this afternoon - we briefly climbed to 83,000. Sweet. For the moment there were only 82,999 books more popular then ours and the dream lives on.
Many thanks, again, upstate New York, you will always be our first love.
1 comment:
I was glad to be there. And the book's great, too!
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