Since the past two days in LA did not start early, I had caught up on my sleep. Wednesday, however, I was scheduled for an hour-long interview at 7 AM with a Denver radio station, KHOW, to talk about my Thursday signing in Denver.  Brian and I had train tickets to San Diego a couple of hours later, and the hotel desk warned us we might not have enough time to get to the train station.  I called ahead, hoping to start the interview a few minutes earlier in order to give us a little more travel time. As the...
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It seems a long time since I’ve spent two nights in a row in the same bed. With two signings in the greater Los Angeles area (Pasadena and Huntington Beach), we stayed at a centrally located hotel in Beverly Hills as our base. Ken picked us up again in the morning to spend the day driving around to bookstores. I was in the room trying to upload the previous blog and photos in a very, very slow internet connection (and the cell phone dropped calls several times…funny, I would have thought Beverly Hills to be Cell-Phone Central). We piled in...
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Warning labels on hotel hair dryer. I feel safe now Heading south from San Francisco on Sunday morning, Brian and I each got up early—Brian to head to the train station for his trip down California’s central valley, and me to the airport for a quick flight to Los Angeles so I could spend part of the afternoon with a producer friend on a project we’re developing. I arrived for a double-whammy: torrential downpour and high winds, the worst storm of the year, AND the annual Los Angeles Marathon, which had many miles of main streets blocked off (for miserable-looking...
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After yesterday’s overnight trip on the Amtrak from Portland down to San Francisco, I awoke surprisingly refreshed.  I don’t usually sleep well on the train (with the jerking and lurching it’s like someone constantly shaking you awake).  Brian and I each had cramped sleeper compartments (I think they're called "cozy") with a little table and a bench seat, and a private coffin-sized bathroom cubicle about half the size of an airplane toilet.  But the train took us where we needed to go.  We were pulling into Sacramento when I woke up, with rain sheeting the window.  Two hours to our...
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