I came home from Toronto Wednesday afternoon, very glad to set foot in Colorado again (and glad for thin cool air after the weeks of the humid heat wave that had followed much of our tour).  Rebecca met me at the air port—a very welcome sight!—and we picked up Cheesecake Factory salads on the way home for dinner.  The cats pretended not to remember me for a few minutes, and then they remembered they were attention starved (especially Linus, our half-feral cat who won’t let anyone else pet him).  It was great to sleep in my own bed, use my own bathtub and shower, and check e-mail in my own office on my own desktop computer.

And plenty of e-mail and correspondence and phone messages to catch up on.  I spent most of the day Thursday just clearing the decks (though I had only six more HELLHOLE chapters to edit, and I was anxious to get that finished).

Just because I was home, though, didn’t mean I was done with the book signings. The day after returning to Colorado, I had one last appearance and signing at the Boulder Bookshop. Rebecca and I drove up to Boulder (a one-hour drive turned into nearly a two-hour nightmare, thanks to a huge accident that had shut down part of Interstate 25).  We met our friend Lauren for dinner beforehand, then went to the signing, where we found another group of dedicated 501st fans suiting up to be my escort.  Giving the talk in front of the audience felt strange, because this was the first time this tour I had spoken without Brian at my side.  (Brian was on his way home, too, riding a train across Canada on a four-day trip…calling me with updates whenever he got into a large enough city for cell reception.)

Alas, I won’t get to enjoy home for long.  On Thursday Rebecca and I are off to LA to teach and present awards at the Writers of the Future event and then the week later we’re off to DragonCon in Atlanta.