The Bride of the Tornado publicity blitz rolls merrily along! I’m about to take a deep breath and head off to Portland, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York City—but before I do that, let’s catch up with our activities around Chicago!

Above is a picture from our Bride of the Tornado event at my beloved neighborhood bookstore, The Book Cellar. That’s me dressed up as a tornado, singing a modified-for-the-book version “Rock You Like A Hurricane” for the puzzled audience, with Lucy and Ingrid enlisted as a security detail.

I was delighted to see all the folks who came out. My podcast co-host Matt Bird graciously helped out with the tornado trivia contest, Kristen Budzynski made a knockout cake of the book cover complete with a 3-D veil fluttering out, and Julie Jurgens and Charlie Crane wowed the audience with tornado-themed music: Neko Case’s “This Tornado Loves You,” Wanda Jackson’s “Funnel of Love,” and as a reference to a certain scene in the book, “People Will Say We’re In Love” from Oklahoma!. It was an amazing evening, and I’m so thankful for everyone who pulled together and contributed to the event!

But that’s not the only event I did in the Chicago area. A few days later, I was on a panel at Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest with Glenn Taylor (The Songs of Betty Baach), moderated by Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas. It was a great discussion!

And then a week or so after that, I was at the Book Stall in Winnetka doing an authors-in-conversation thing with Kathleen Rooney, whose fantastic new book From Dust to Stardust just came out. It’s a historical novel based on the life of real-life silent film star Colleen Moore, who is also responsible for the famous “Fairy Castle” in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. The book is great, Kathleen was an engaging and generous conversation partner, and she had lots of fans show up too! Kathleen not only writes novels, but also runs projects like Poems While You Wait and the indie publisher Rose Metal Press.

Actually, this wasn’t the first time I’d shared a stage with Kathleen Rooney! Way back in 2010, she was one of the judges at something I participated in called Literary Death Match, a live event in which authors compete by reading/performing their stuff and then doing silly competitive stunts. I blogged about the experience way back then.

One of the competitions was that the contestants had to quickly sketch the judges in about 20 seconds, and here’s my (ahem, winning) sketch of Kathleen, next to the real thing, nearly 13 years ago:

Hey, I wrote an article about my “Five Midwestern Horror Picks” for the Quirk Books blog! I talk about my love for Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Dan Kraus’s Rotters, Dan Chaon’s Ill Will, and John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester.. You can read the article here.

I’m fresh off a Michigan mini-tour for Bride of the Tornado! In three days I visited Grand Rapids, Petoskey, and Ann Arbor, meeting my readers. As a born-and-bred Michigander, this was a real treat, and something unexpected and fun happened at every stop. (Also, on the highway the back cover of a pickup truck blew off and flew right at me. Luckily I swerved just in time. That was unexpected but decidedly not fun.)

Hometown Michigan friends, I’m coming your way too—I’m doing a bookstore visit at Sidetrack Books in Royal Oak next month, on October 27. And Chicago, I’m doing another event this Thursday, September 7 at my neighborhood bookstore, the Book Cellar, in conversation with my podcast co-host Matt Bird, with musical stylings by Julie Jurgens! As always, my complete events schedule is here.

At every stop I came charging out in my tornado costume, sang “Rock You Like A Hurricane” with the lyrics rewritten to explain the plot of the book, then did some readings from the book, with a “tornado trivia contest” throw in for fun:

I started my mini-tour at Schuler Books in Grand Rapids. They have a beautiful event space in the back, and Elizabeth, Alana, and Indigo were very supportive hosts. My favorite thing, though, was meeting Josh, an Order of Odd-Fish fan from way back who has also read Dare to Know! It made me feel like I wasn’t shouting into the void after all. He’s a writer too—he has fiction coming up in The MockingOwl Roost, and I’m looking forward to his planned novel about “the Divine Comedy meets Jeeves & Wooster books.” Here we are—that’s right, he’s got an old-school library-binding copy of Odd-Fish:

From there it was on to McLean & Eakin Booksellers in Petoskey. My family used to occasionally vacation in Petoskey growing up—it’s a gorgeous place. McLean & Eakin rounded up a great crowd to listen to me rant and rave . . . and they had wine, pizza, and beer thanks to Beards Brewery just a few doors down!

The whole thing was arranged by Zach, whom I met because he dug Dare to Know back in 2021. He was so kind and accommodating, he even gave me a free book and a six-pack on the way out. What a fantastic night! Thank you!

From there it was on to Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor. More big surprises here: Victoria (next to me in the picture below) had already read and loved Bride of the Tornado and had lots of smart and pertinent questions, and Jason (not pictured) and I reminisced about The Electrifying Mojo and the Wizard from 1980s Detroit radio days! (The unseen DJ “Electrifier” in Bride is based on them.)

Thanks for a great time, Michigan—and the tour isn’t over! More dates to come!