Five Reasons for a Book Tour
1) Ego. When somebody who's not related to me is willing to listen, I'm happy.
2) Money. By my own accounting, book royalties pulled in an average of $7/day (before taxes, expenses, and the 15% cut to my agent).
3) Visiting Faraway Friends. Christmas family portraits come alive and the children reputed to be honor roll-piano wizard-ballerinas are exposed as...pretty nice kids.
4) Movement. Watching the wings of a 757 flex like a very large soaring bird as we catch an updraft over the Rockies; piloting a rented Ford through Virginia, a state buried in tulip poplar and shagbark hickory; stirring at dawn to see the first light on the Algodones Dunes from a sleeper on Amtrak's Sunset Limited; and ferrying north through the chop of San Francisco Bay, the water like stainless steel, the fog clearing to reveal the sinister antenna on Twin Peaks that hovers over the city like a praying mantis.
5) Coming Home. Back on my bicycle, riding through the cactus desert under a fleet of cumulus trailing lighting and black spouts of rain, and all the while thinking: this is the place.
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Stephen Vivona says:
There's no place like home...
Welcome home Dorothy! Why do you need the other four reasons when the money is SO GOOD?! But it is true, the only way to truly know that you live in the right place is to travel. The perspective gained from travel is invaluable. As a fellow cyclist, I also know that wonderful feeling of spinning the pedals through the byways of one's home turf. At the same time that you experience the familiarity of the old roads the bicycle allows you to realize these roads are never the same. They are always different due to that day's unique weather, the lighting, the vegetation, and your own unique perspective. The past travels and the future plans all pause for the "now" of the clicking freewheel, the hum from the tires, and the rainbow in front of the monsoon clouds. There's no place like home.