More good things that happened in 2010: The Great American (and International!) Book Tour.

The process of writing a book really, really sucks. It’s like writing the longest term paper of your life, but unlike term papers, which you most likely wrote under the influence of Ritalin, borrowing heavily from the same papers your buddy from Cornell wrote on the same topics, and which you didn’t care about anyway, writing a book matters. It’s your one shot to tell your story to the world, your one chance at literary fame, and the ultimate opportunity to be able to tell your boss, “Screw you and this job – I’m a goddamned writer now!” So you best bring it. 

(I’ll save you the “So why didn’t you bring it for your book, Jason?” joke. Assholes.)

But the BEST thing about writing a book – aside from the fame and the money and being a huge hit at parties when people ask you what you do, then you tell them you’re a writer, then they ask what kind of writer, and you say you wrote a memoir, and then they ask, “Like, about your life? Or someone else’s?”, and you say no, about your life, and they ask, “Well, um, why?” – is doing readings and events and meeting readers.  

When my book came out in March, I was fortunate enough to spend the next several months doing readings and events around the country, as well as a happy hour in London. All told, I hit Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, DC, Eatontown (NJ), Los Angeles, Milwaukee, NYC, Philly, and Surf City (NJ) (and I’m still planning on getting to Denver and Seattle at some point this year). And each event was its own adventure: driving alone through the Midwest in a state of constant-hangover in a black 1996 Lincoln TownCar to do readings in Cleveland, Chicago and Milwaukee; getting absolutely obliterated in DC and missing my train the next morning; bombing during a reading in a room packed full of geriatrics in Eatontown who showed up for a free event at their local library and instead got a story filled with cuss words, but then doing a really fun Q&A during which I was asked “Is the Facebook a blog?” and “Do you play Dungeons & Dragons?”; and doing an incredible reading/Q&A at McNally Jackson here in NYC, the bookstore I’ve walked by (and patronized) for years and years before seeing my book in its store. And I’ll tell you, I don’t think I’ll ever get over the trip of meeting people who’ve read the book or the blog (hopefully both) and seeing how nice and, more importantly, how beautiful/handsome they are.   

Book two is scheduled to come out sometime in 2012, and though I haven’t started writing it, don’t know what it’ll be about, and haven’t really even thought about it for more than ten minutes since getting (and spending) the first portion of the advance, I’ve put a GINORMOUS amount of time into planning a road trip/book tour to support it, a two-week jaunt that will take me 2,400 miles through Philly, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Nashville, Atlanta, DC and then back to Philly. I can worry about things like “book subject” later; if I learned anything in my first go-around as an author, it’s the readings and events that are important.

(Re: picture - that Franzen kid’s got a lot of talent. Shame he had to follow me, though.)