In 2005 and 2006, I kept a tour blog. In 2005, the link was sent out to certain friends; in 2006, I posted an invitation here.

Everyone behaved beautifully. No one ratted me out. (Not that there was much to report. I was candid, but largely about my own mistakes and mishaps.) The blogs, when I read them now, are as vivid as my last successful journal-keeping exercise, which dates back to the 1989 diary I kept in Mexico. Nothing proves the central concept of The Memory Project better than my actual calendar pages from those three months, which list my classmates each week, my teachers, and strange snippets of phrases that should be wholly obscure almost twenty years later, but prove capable of unlocking vivid memories. "Weird bus," for example, the sole entry on April 23, is how I summarized the decision of a bus driver, caught in a late Sunday afternoon traffic jam between Taxco and Cuernavaca, to create a "third lane" in the middle of the two-lane highway. My mother and I exchanged worried glances, even as my sister slept through it all. Or "tourist card adventure,"from March 29th: That is a reference to my need to journey to Mexico City, to extend my tourist card. The address given, however, was for a federal building damaged in the earthquake of 1987. Once there, I had to do quite a bit of sleuthing and cab-riding to find the right place.

(Okay, some of the phrases are mysterious, such as "Kiss of the Spiderwoman/leftist cell," and I'm amazed that didn't note the date that I was stung by a scorpion -- February 18 -- although I did write an extended version of it, which included the advice of my host "father," that I eat "no carne, no mariscos, no huevos." He was a doctor, so I obeyed.)

Still . . . I don't think I'm going to do it. The burglary still has me rattled and my household is entering what I'll call the Insanity Vortex, with some very challenging . . . we'll call it scheduling, and it's all good, but a little daunting.

Oh, and those who have detected a hypergraphia streak -- bingo. I never write more than when I have a lot to write. Last week, I submitted the first fifty pages of the next Tess Monaghan novel, so my editor has a sense of what I'm doing. Today, I filed an introduction for one anthology and by week's end, I'll have writtten an afterword for another. Meanwhile, I have a lot of student work to contemplate.

So, no official tour blog, but maybe some entries here along the way.