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.
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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.
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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:
