I got up and out this morning horridly early for me; of late it takes me like 2 hours to go from slug to human, and not even then all the time. Does anyone have a good cleaner for slime trails??

Anyhoo (or to quote Cornelia's sister) Hemingway, I had a good reason to get my butt out of bed at quarter after 6 and onto a bus an hour later to head downtown. And please forgive the namedrop, but you folks will get that it's because I was so pleased and thrilled abut it all. See, yesterday, Lee Child posted on his tour blog that he had 120 people waiting for him at Poisoned Pen in Phoenix; this morning, we had breakfast. That is like SO KEWL. No seriously, folks, I think it was so lovely and splendid of Lee to make time for me. His schedule is insane; fun but insane. And full of forms of whiplash like "110 in Phoenix, 65 in Seattle". How the hell do you PACK for something like that? And he was off to do some stock signing, then appear at Seattle Mystery Books and by this evening he's in LA.

And it looks like Reacher's gonna be a movie. Or more than one. Holy hell. I can't avoid the cliché of "it can't happen to a nicer guy". No shit, really because it CAN'T. Think of ALL the people who have made money and been successful who you wish would disappear, not just from your tv or newspaper or whatever, but from the planet. Jsut poof, gone from teh face of the earth. People who are famous for being famous. People who's talent cannot be found by using a microscope. People who wear orange colored ferrets on their heads. It's now slgithly balanced. Because then there's Lee. Wow. And i hope the REacher movie(s) are wildly successful and he sells even more books. Because he's SO one of the good guys. I can't even tell you half the reasons i think so because you wouldn't believe me.

Lee and I have had discussions where he's said "but you hate my books" and I have to whap him a little and insist that no I don't, it's just that Reacher's too perfect for me. And he knows this, he knows that Reacher's appeal is, in many ways, the antidote to the Rebuses of Ian Rankin, and Stephen Booth's Ben Cooper and Denise Mina's Maureen and the dark angst-ridden, heavily-screwed-up protagonists that are popular. And whom we also like and read. But Reacher's not like that. He just fixes things. And that too is, obviously, appealing to many people. And that's legit. They BOTH are. And, I hasten to remind Lee what I also believe; that he's a damn talented writer. And that I totally get Reacher's appeal. I mean, look folks, when I hosted an on-line chat with Lee a few years ago, he was the pretty much the only author whose work I did not know well; mainly I had been hitting up friends whose books I thought did well and we'd have a group of people on line and they'd ask questions and all that jazz. But Lee? My god. I went into the chat room early (to dust, you know, put out fresh doilies, make sure that they'd mopped up after the hot tub incident) and there was someone who'd been waiting for Two HOURS. In Australia (this was four years ago by the way). And there were actually TWO of them; they'd taken a SICK DAY to be sure to attend the chat. Holy fan club, batman.I didn't even KNOW about "Reacher's Creatures" at the time.

And the next day I got the nicest thank you in my email box that I got from ANY of the 23 authors I'd hosted chats with. Not that the other folks weren't really nice and appreciative and polite; it was in part WHAT he said and that we didn't now each other. It's email I saved because it was just so damn nice.

So this morning I've got my walkthing with me (oh, gods, I still haven't uploaded the stuff to the iPod and I need to do something about that SO SO SO much) because I hate cell phone conversations and the jesus freaks on the bus. (It was a toss-up last night - bus or cab - and bus won. Surprisingly my bus karma was superb; and I was early to the hotel and my return bus arrived within 2 minutes of getting to the stop.) And among the CD's I grabbed was Cris Williamson's Live in Concert album.

Cris is probably not someone familiar to you; she was one of the BEST of the "women's music" performers, a major Olivia recording artist, back when "women's music" was at its height. She has a gorgeous crystalline voice and her songs have always been among my favorites. (There's a CD out that I really must get that's Cris and Holly (Near) which I suspect I'll just adore.) This concert CD contains a nostalgia section of some of her oldest and best, along with some wonderful other stuff, like a fine version of James Taylor's "Mill Worker" (I seem now to have at least 3 versions of that song; by Cris, JT himself and Emmylou). And while I try to keep it down ON the bus, once I got off the bus heading up the hill to the house, I started singing along with Cris. And just as I got to within about a block of the house from the bus stop, the song that came on was "Waterfall" which starts out "Sometimes it takes a rainy day, just to let you know, everything's going to be all right". Did I mention it had just begun raining?