Deja Vu All Over Again

Interview season has started and I’d forgotten how hard it is because you have to say the same thing over and over and over again, trying to put a new spin on things if you’re dealing with somebody whose outlet is close in geography to somebody else you just gave an interview to except you can’t remember who you gave the last interview to. This should be readily apparent to anybody reading this blog because we said it all here first. “Isn’t there anything new to say?” you ask. No. This is the story of Don’t Look Down. We can talk about Agnes which has something new every day, but that just confuses things in interviews because Agnes is next year. Don’t Look Down is this year. I don’t even REMEMBER Don’t Look Down, so I have to go read it again.

And behind the scenes Bob and I are responding to stress in our usual way: badly. We’ve been doing this for a year and a half so we’ve pretty much got it down. I get overwhelmed and panic and start to scream and thrash around and Bob says, “Shhh, I can fix anything” and then if I don’t stop thrashing, says, “Knock it off,” and if it’s really bad, he yells. Bob gets overwhelmed and panics and does something stupid, and I say, “STOP THAT” and yank on his chain, and he says, “That was stupid, wasn’t it?” and I yell. Then we both sit there in the aftershock promising each other that it will NEVER happen again. The only thing that’s new is that we’re imploding on a much more frequent basis now that we’re staring down the street date and the book tour. In fact, last weekend we managed to synchronize meltdowns which isn’t doing anybody any good. But it’s okay. We’ve been here before. Deja fight all over again.

And then there’s the tour, which is déjà vu for me but brand new for Bob. He knows it’s going to be bad, but until you’ve really experienced it, you can’t believe how soul-sucking it is. Tami Hoag had the perfect tour experience: She got up in the middle of the night, forgot where she was (in a hotel room), tripped over some furniture, fell, and blacked her eye. That’s a metaphor for every night on the road. Sometimes for the days. I was doing a live interview on a TV morning show once when the hostess said brightly, “And where will you be signing tonight, Jennifer?” I said, just as brightly, “Right here in Atlanta, Jane, at the XYZ Bookstore.” She said, “No, you won’t, this is Memphis,” and gave the name of the real bookstore I was signing at. Normally Bob bails me out on the details, but he never knows where the hell we are on regular weekends so this “if it’s Tuesday it must be New Jersey” stuff is going to mind-(obscenity deleted) him. He’s already halfway there; he keeps calling Don’t Look Down an action adventure instead of Romantic Adventure, and you know how much he loves those talking points. It’s only a matter of time before he looks at me in the middle of a TV interview and says, “Who are you again?” He says it all the time to me in e-mails, but he’s kidding there. I think.

And in the middle of it all is this blog, which we created for PR, of course, but also so we’d have a journal of this year. On the one hand, we want it to be an accurate record of the tour and of writing Agnes. On the other hand, we’re both such drama queens (well, Bob’s a drama king), plus the tour process really is a nightmare in spite of St. Martin’s doing everything they can to help, that if we tell the truth about everything, the blog will be so depressing nobody will come. Also, if we told the truth about everything, you wouldn’t want to have lunch with either one of us since we are both deeply disturbed. So it’s the whole “tell the truth but tell it slant, success in circuit lies” thing. Which reminds me, thanks for “Dover Beach,” Talpianna, although you left off the last lines, my faves. I’ve sent Arnold's poem to Bob twice, maybe three times, and I always get back the same answer: “Huh?” But I was glad to see it again, just the same:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Damn good description of a book tour. And for partners who are determined not to tear each other to shreds while they’re thrashing around in separate panics. Because we’ve been here before. We can do this. Deja PR. No thrashing permitted.

No, no, none of this is true. We are calm and collected, complete professionals, nothing to see here, move it along. Bob’s kayaking and I’m eating chocolate, everything is just the same as it’s always been. In fact, just go re-read the earlier entries because everything is the same now as it was then.

Deja blog. Really.

Argh.