May 6 Barnes & Noble, Bellingham WA

And so it begins...

Think of it as a practice run -- here it was, the opening salvo of the Jin-shei tour, in my own home town, with an audience full of friends as well as strangers who happened to read about the event that day in the papers. One of the strangers happened to be a Chinesse woman who had finely-tuned questions about the book, and who said she'd be back at the second Bellingham signing, on May 11, with more questions (since she had only just started the book the night before, and hadn't had a chance to build up a proper head of curiosity yet). But she had already acquired enough of the flavour of the novel to tell me as I was signing her copy that a part of her wished that I was in fact Chinese. I take that as a great compliment.

They tell me at the store that at signings, they sell, on average, three or four copies of the book being promoted -- tonight they sold seven, and one the day before (perhaps the Chinese lady's). The store is happy, I thought the audience went away happy, and I was certainly very happy -- particularly when I came home and looked on the computer and discovered that in the time between when I left the machine, at roughly 6 PM, and returned to it, at about 10 PM, Jin-shei had leapfrogged from about 81,000 to 15,677 in the Amazon sales ranks. It was a pretty good day, and a fine beginning....

May 10 Annie Blooms Books, Portland OR

The Portland hotel is amazing. It has a doorman dressed in authentic imitation British Beefeater uniform, and they actually hold doors open (in the era of automatic doors, that's a forgotten courtesy). Inside, they confirm that I'm only there for one night. Yes, I'm doing a book signing, I say. The guy behind the desk perks up. Oh? They have a library in the hotel, he informs me. Apparently it features many past guests' books. It's a literary hotel, it appears... I dump bags into room and then trot back downstairs, hotel's complimentary umbrella in tow, asking to be pointed in the direction of Powell's, the biggest bestest bookstore in the world according to its publicity, and I set off along Portland's tree-lined streets in the misting rain.

I get to Powell's a couple of hours before my standing appointment with the director of events and the arranged stock signing at 3 pm. This turns out to be an unexpectedly bad idea. Well, I should have known that going into a bookstore, any bookstore, would be risky -- but THIS bookstore is frankly dangerous. I actually wound up having to tell them to ship most of my purchases back home to me, because I'd only brought a small little overnight carry-on bag which would have exploded if I had tried to stuff all the books I had purchased into it, never mind probably prevented the small commuter aircraft used on the route from taking off at all. The Events Coordinator finally rescues me from the stacks, brings out my own books to sign, and we have a nice chat about provisional dates for a reading/signing visit to Powells when the paperback of Jin-shei comes out next year. I'm not sure I dare come back to this place -- at least with my credit cards in my purse -- but being part of this fabulous bookshop's author event calendar will be a definite highlight.

I walk back to the hotel (in the rain), dump the books, collect my finery, and catch a cab out to the artsy district of Portland where Annie Bloom's Bookstore is. This is quite a different beast from the gigantic Powell's: a small, intimate space piled with books and even complete with a bookstore cat meandering in the stacks. Those present at the reading are interested and enthusiastic, and one of the guys who buys a copy says that he'll be recommending the book to his reading group. That's pretty good, I guess.

I get a copy of the book to donate to the Heathman Hotel library. The girl who accepts it on the hotel's behalf is leafing through it as I leave her with the book; another reader, perhaps, right there.

The next day, after a hurried early breakfast, I catch a plane back to Bellingham.

May 11 Village Books, Bellingham WA

The reading at Village Books is by far the highlight of the tour so far. I didn't exactly count, but at a rough estimate there must have been close to 40 people in the audience. I know that the VB folks have done a mailing about this because I find a pre-printed postcard lying around in the shop. Taking the occasional temperature of the audience's reactions as I am reading, I notice that there are quite a few whose eyes are definitely aglitter with tears as I finish reading a particularly affecting portion of my reading selection. To me, as the writer, there can be no greater compliment.

Afterwards, when I'm doing the signing, Melissa from VB brings me two extra copies for folks who asked for signed copies to be reserved for them. This is very cool. They tell me they've sold more than 20 copies of the book since its release, exactly two weeks ago now, and that's pretty good for a hardback novel.

Outside, on the billboard by the door, I catch a glimpse of a posterlet advertising the reading from my "impressive new novel." Thanks, VB!

May 12 Univeristy Bookstore, Seattle WA

The hotel in Seattle is another funky one -- they offer pet goldfish for your room, if you request them upon check-in. I asked. It's kind of fun having one -- it's in a classic goldfish bowl, the kind that Clio the Cartoon Cat always paw-fished in for the family guppy.

The lady introducing me in University Books tells me that she's about halfway through the book herself, and that it reminded her of her childhood -- of the kind of reading where you'd get so lost in the book that you'd forget there was a real world waiting for you. I like it that my book has the capacity to trigger that in people. It's another great compliment.

There's a bunch of old friends in this particular outing, and after the obligatory signing session in the store we seized the chance to catch up with one another a little over slices of pizza in the University District. After that, it was back to the hotel and the waiting goldfish.

The next day was a media blitz -- I talked with reporters at two major daily city newspapers, one of whom indicated that a review was in the offing for the following Friday, which was the day before my next Seattle reading, which was great news. I spoke on the phone to another book editor, at a local weekly, who also said he would try to squeeze in a review -- if a large local film festival didn't eat up all the available space for this particular week. A bit of bad timing...

I made contact with at least one radio/TV station, and I've got plans to pursue with the Seattle Public Library later this week, perhaps to do with their grand re-opening in new premises on the weekend that I am there for my second reading. I also visit Borders Books in central Seattle where I do a stock signing, and, on the way home, stop in the venerable Elliott Bay Book Company store ‡ another place I dearly love which is a deadly danger to my wallet (on this occasion I was there for about two hours and I came away with three books. And I think I restrained myself mightily...). The upshot of that visit is that I have a date with Elliott Bay -- I'm back in Seattle for a reading/signing with them, on my birthday, July 5. Can't wait!

Home, then, to grab a bit of rest before the next round. Back to Seattle in just over a week...

22 May 2004 Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA

This one was... interesting.

The taxi ride from the hotel I'm was staying at, in downtown Seattle, was long, and involved a considerable stretch of freeway -- turns out that Third Place Books is closer to Edmonds than it is to Seattle, which makes it a good way back towards home. It might have been considerably easier to drive here and never go into the actual city of Seattle at all. As it happens, serendipity rules and there was a good reason to be in Seattle after all -- of which, more later.

Third Place Books is one of those bookstores I love -- eclectic and full of surprises. The table by the front entrance held some 24 copies of Jin-shei and a placard announcing my event. The person in charge of coordinating the reading wasn't there when I arrived (seeing as I was an hour early, that wasn't surprising) so I browsed the stacks waiting for things to happen. I was due to go on at 6 PM -- but by quarter to six not much was happening, no setup for the reading, nothing...

And then everything happened at once. People arrived with a frightening number of folding chairs and proceeded to set them into rows with quiet efficiency. The store contact person, Judith, arrived, arrranged for coffee, set up a reading podium, set up a microphone.

At this point it was a few minute past six, and I actually had an audience waiting patiently in the serried ranks of chairs. I was warmly introduced, and we were off.

When I was done reading I was greeted with silence -- a long, breathless moment of silence before time moved on and those present began to applaud, to smile, to ask questions. But I just wanted to thank everyone again, publicly, for giving me the gift of that moment. It's something I'll treasure.

There was quite a bit of discussion, after. One of the women in the audience actually turned out to be from my home town of Bellingham and had come all the way to Third Place Books because she had to miss both of the Belingham ones -- and I discovered that one of the books is desitned for someone all the way in Taiwan...

The next day, coming back to that digression at the start of this account, it was the grand opening of the new Seattle Public Library in its central library headquarters, an architectural vision in girders and glass... right across the street from our downtown hotel.

Alma with Jennifer Baker at the new Seattle Public Library

Armed with a copy of Jin-shei I intended to present at the new Seattle library as a "birthday" gift, I joined the crowd of 25,000 people waiting to be admitted to the breathtaking Rem Koolhaas-designed building. I hoped to find the two librarians who gave me glowing reviews for Jin-shei, but the unexpected size of the crowd gave me pause. When I finally got into the building, though, events started unfolding rapidly. I spoke to someone at the information desk, who promptly spied the Fiction Director of the library and dragged me over to present the book, and then the Director offered to take me to meet the two librarian reviewers I had been hoping to find. Meeting them was everything I had hoped it would be. I spent a thoroughly exhilarating morning basking in Jennifer Baker's enthusiasm and Nancy Pearl's warm approval -- she even said she planned to review the book in her radio spot shortly. And Jin-shei is the first item in the very first edition of the library's "staff picks" flyer, which had been put out into the brand-spanking-new stacks just that morning.

You can't ask for better than that.

Oh, but another brief digression is in order. On the way out of the library, I came across a canopy raised right there on the sidewalk where a drum jam session was in progress. Passers by could sit down, grab a drum, and just join in. I did. It was impossible to just walk by. It was an exhilarating conclusion to an exhilarating trip. I still feel bright and alive and full of sparkle and inspiration.

Now, off to California...

26 May 2004 A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books, San Francisco, CA

This is getting exciting.

Yes, I know, Portland and Seattle are both "big cities" -- but Seattle is my backyard, as it were, and I've actually been to Portland before... San Francisco is taking this tour into a whole new dimension. It's a big city -- a really big city -- a strange really big city I've never set foot in before -- and that's not even taking into account it's the home city to my publishers, HarperSanFrancisco.

By the time Deck and I land at SF International and find means of getting out of it and into the city, it's close to 3 PM. My first reading is at 7 PM. Barely enough time for a quick spruce up, a somewhat hurried but very nice pre-reading meal at a nearby restaurant called Max's Opera Café (they have a chocolate cheesecake to die for), and then I'm into the bookshop with the wonderful name of A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books. Among the audience at the reading is Eleanor Farrell from the Mythopoeic Society, with whom I've exchanged a few emails -- it's nice to put a face to the name, as always -- and Jennifer Johns, my publicity director at Harper, together with a gallery of Harper Collins folks along to cheer one of "their" authors on. The bookstore person in charge of the event gives me a perfectly lovely introduction, which I'm still kicking myself for not asking to have a copy of, and I launch into my reading. The response is good -- so good, in fact, that at the end one of the audience wanted to know if I was ever, in fact, tortured (after I read a passage about particularly nasty stuff being done to a helpless kitten, I guess) and I'll take that as a compliment, the same way I took it for a compliment when a reader once asked, after reading a story of mine with a blind protagonist, whether I was myself blind. Somewhere, somehow, I struck the right note. After, I linger talking to one of the visiting Harper Collins editors -- who helps me pick out a book from the stacks, a generous gesture from the bookstore which offers me one as a gift following my reading. A really good night.

27 May 2004 -- Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA

And things just keep getting better.

A limousine picked me and Deck up in the morning to take us to the Book Passage reading at 1 PM -- we crossed a fog-shrouded Golden Gate bridge, with me unable to wipe a huge delighted grin off my face, and deposited us at the doorstep of the bookstore.

This is a beautiful store with absolutely wonderful people. I had asked Deck, barely twenty-four hours before we got to Book Passage, which his favourite bookstore had been so far, and he'd told me. When we got here, he said, "No longer. It's this place." There was a prominent display of Jin-shei up front; I was met by Karen, the bookstore's events coordinator in charge, who plied me with lattes and then, when it seemed that the audience was going to be rather more intimate than numerous, simply began a conversation about the novel, involving everyone present, making the occasion one that was more a gathering of friends than a speaker talking to an audience. But then more folks turned up, and I did do my prepared reading. The response was absolutely wonderful, people's faces were eloquent, and moved, and moving. There were questions, nods, smiles. I signed a heap of stock, including several pre-bought copies for folks who could not be there. Then we were invited to have lunch in the bookstore's little café, and Karen presented me with a gift, a box full of beautiful stationery with "Alma Alexander" embossed on the card stock. This was even before the ride back in the limo, back over the bridge, stopping for windblown photographs with Golden Gate ghostly in the misty background, and a meandering ride back to the hotel taking in the steep streets of San Farncisco, including the phenomenal Lombard Street.

I think I love this city. If I may borrow a cliché, I left at least a part of my heart in San Francisco.

The next day, Friday, was a free day, sort of -- made special by the fact that my UK editor, Katie Espiner, happened to be in San Francisco that day and I was able to spend a couple of wonderful hours with her over lunch at a superb Greek restaurant. What time was left was given to such things as visiting the Ghirardelli store and practically swooning over the chocolate displays in it, riding a cable car back into downtown from a sun-drenched Fisherman's Wharf, getting off said cable car too early and hoofing it along the steep streets of San Francisco.

It was a good few days. A great few days. Now it's on to New York...

9 June 2004 -- Barnes & Noble, Greenwich Village, NYC

The sun hung low in the sky, an apocalyptic orange-red ball, as the bus left JFK and hit the highway labyrinth into Manhattan. Cars and trucks and buses wove in and out of lanes at a speed that left me clutching the back of the seat in front of me. Somewhere ahead of us, a low reef of concentrated lights began to rise lazily from a background of darkening sky lit only by the occasional electronic billboard. As we approached, it grew taller -- first foothills, then mountains, then the massive cliff-face of that familiar skyline, instantly recognizable -- the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building. And then we were in it, and it was straight out of Blade Runner, it was Gotham City, bright billboards and eye-popping halogen spotlights and bright flickering neon, theatre names ablaze, the gothic façade of Grand Central Station brooding like a haunted house there amongst the skyscrapers. Somewhere above, almost like a parody of Venice, a structure resembling a futuristic Bridge of Sighs arched across a canyon-like road.

I'd been looking forward to this for months -- when they first told me that I'd be coming to New York, I basically started a song-and-dance routine along the lines of "Start spreadin' the news, I'm leaving in May...." -- but now I was here, and the reality of it breathed and honked and hooted and flashed and shimmered and lived right outside my hotel window, and I was so wound up that it was past midnight before I could bring myself to go to bed. It was closer to 2AM before I got to sleep, and then I woke at 6 AM the next morning. So I ordered a pot of coffee from room service, pretty near finished the whole thing within forty minutes, and prepared to face the rest of my day running on that and adrenaline.

My first meeting of the day was a working breakfast with my New York agent Jill (who had been just a voice on the phone before this moment) and a Harper Collins editor interested in my latest work-in-progress. It seemed to me that I talked a lot -- for breakfast, I chose a NYC staple, a bagel, and most of it kept on being right there on my plate as I chatted away. I was an author on my very own book tour, I was in one of the hubs of world publishing, and I was having breakfast and discussing a potential book sale with two card-carrying members of the publishing profession. Life doesn't get much better than this...

Breakfast over, they both left to pursue other obligations, but I was due to meet Jill again for lunch. In the meantime, I had a few hours to myself, and my new potential editor, Ruth, coaxed me into setting foot into that scary maelstrom of cars and people that was Fifth Avenue, just half a block away from my hotel. I did proper homage to New York, the tourist gawk with the neck snapped as far back as it would go, and then I decided to snaffle a NYC experience and took a horse-and-buggy ride around Central Park (during which I was phoned on my brand-new little cell phone by the OTHER editor I was due to meet that day, to arrange a time and place for the meeting...). On the way back to my hotel I stopped at a few landmark Fifth Avenue shops, and blinked owlishly at dresses with price tags of $3000, but then I walked into Tiffany's and found a beautiful pair of tiny teardrop earrings which I could actually begin to think about being able to afford, so I got them and told my husband (on my brand new little cellphone) that he had just bought me my birthday present.

I had a perfect lunch with my wonderful agent (she picked Chinese -- she thought, she told me with a grin, that it would be apt) discussing projects past, current, and future. It went fast -- too fast; we had to scramble to get back to the hotel, where I was due to meet the other editor for afternoon tea. We'd meet once more that day, Jill and I, since she'd be coming to my reading.

Tea with Diana, editor of the US editions of my fantasy duology "Changer of Days" (coming out in the States in the spring of 2005), was in a funky Zen Japanese teashop on Fifth Avenue where I had rosehip tea and butter biscuits and we thrashed out some issues concerning the titles of the two books in the States. I've already seen the cover sketch for book #1 -- and it's magnificent. Can't wait to see what they do with the second book.

Then it was back to the hotel, into one of those yellow cabs, and all the way over to Greenwich Village, where my mugshot and a couple of display copies of Jin-shei graced the window right next to the entrance to the Barnes & Noble. I changed into my trademark cheongsam and sat chatting with my friend Alex, who had come all the way from Philadelphia and who I hadn't seen for far too long. Finally the clock struck 7:30 and I was introduced by the store's events manager.

The audience featured the largest number of Chinese people that I've had in any reading on the tour so far, and their responses to the passages I read were heartwarming -- one, a serious-looking young man, said to me afterward, "Those were very wonderful words that you have read."

The audience also contained a bunch of friends -- Alex, Sylvia (who came all the way from Texas and who took a lot of professional-looking photographs, tripod and all), Stan (the only one of the bunch who actually lives in New York), and Jill, who sat in the second row from the front wearing a tiny smile throughout my reading. She left soon after, as she was on her way to London the next morning, and I signed some fifty copies of the store's stock of books and then went out for coffee and chat with my friends.

It was a grand day, a wonderful day, a perfect day. By the end of it, New York had temporarily ceased to scare me and offered only pure exhilaration. I was a writer; I was in the greatest city in the world giving readings of a book I had written; I had met with wonderful editors, a brilliant agent, and a bunch of dear friends. Life really, really, really doesn't get better than this.

10 June 2004 Barnes & Noble, Framingham, MA

I got back to JFK the next morning, only to be told that my flight was actually leaving from La Guardia. I had arrived at JFK, and it honestly hadn't occurred to me to check from which I would be departing.

A city shouldn't have two major airports. It's confusing.

However, I did make it to La Guardia in time, thanks to a really friendly Indian cabbie who shared his entire life history in the forty-odd minutes it took us to get there -- he drives cabs part-time while studying for a degree in computer science, his wife is ten years younger than him and is also studying and has a better average than he does, and he has a two-year-old son of whom he is very proud. He also thought I was 26 years old, which was very gratifying indeed. He got my bags out at La Guardia when we got there, promised to buy a copy of my book, and asked me not to forget him.

I arrived in Boston and caught another cab to my hotel. The adrenaline had worn off, and I had no pressing appointments, so I had a bite to eat for lunch and then dozed for a while, watching reruns of "NYPD Blue" on TV -- the intro sequence for that was rather more fun than usual because I kept on catching landmarks and crowing to myself that I'd just been there. At around a quarter to five, I caught another cab -- the Barnes and Noble where I was doing my reading was not in Boston proper but in a town called Framingham, some twenty miles outside the city -- four toll-plazas away on the Massachusetts Turnpike. My driver, who had never been to the area before, got us ever so slightly turned around and we kind of blundered about for a while, but eventually we found the store, and I parked myself in front of it for my scheduled meeting with yet another crowd of cyberfriends. Jayne, a fellow writer who had reviewed Changer of Days for a US publication and who had come all the way from Maine, arrived first, closely followed by Eric and Mary Jo. We all repaired to the nearest Friday's for dinner before the reading, and then trooped across the parking lot into the store.

"You look just like your picture," said Margaret, the person in charge of the event, and then generously offered to stand a round of coffees in the attached Starbucks not just for myself but for my entire entourage.

When it came time for the reading, I was handed what Jayne later called a "karaoke mike," a hand-held microphone with which I proceeded to do what I firmly believe was the best reading I'd given on the entire tour so far. A lively discussion and Q&A session followed, and yet another as-yet-unmet cyberfriend turned up, from my new home newsgroup, and it was grand to have her there. But all good things come to an end, and by the time I'd signed the store's stock of books (and a couple which were purchased then and there by members of the audience), my taxi driver had returned for me, and I made my farewells and returned to the hotel, where I had some Boston Cream Pie for a fittingly sweet end to the East Coast proceedings.

It was back to Seattle the next day, home for the weekend, and back to my travels on Monday morning -- onward and upward, literally, to the Mile High City...

14 June 2004 Cultural Legacy Bookshop, Denver CO

An interesting thing happened on the way to the forum. Waiting in the Bellingham airport for my departure on this leg of the tour, I hauled out my yarn and my crochet needle in order to kill some time by making a granny-square or two for the blanket-in-progress. A silver-haired lady who looked much like a slightly older Diane Keaton leaned over and asked what I was making; she confessed to a knitting project in her own bag. Later, as we filed through security and settled into the waiting area just inside the gate awaiting boarding, she hauled that out and we exchanged a few craft-related comments. Then we asked one another where we were travelling to (she said, somewhat startlingly, Cameroon...) and I confessed to being on my way to Denver and to being on book tour. She asked after the book I was out promoting, and I hauled out a bookmark and handed it to her.

"THAT book!" she exclaimed. "It's that book! I just found that on the Internet, it's on my computer as an interesting book to read! I just saw it advertised in the New Yorker or somewhere glossy like that! Oooh, it's that book! Oh, I'm so tickled to have met you! My friend in Port Townsend is going to be sooo jealous when I tell her I met you!"

A fan, by the grace of God. It was a novel experience, so to speak, to have this kind of encounter -- to meet a perfect stranger who knows you and is pleased to have made your acquaintance.

In Denver, later that afternoon, I made my way to the somewhat funky "literary" quarter where the Cultural Legacy Bookstore, my destination, was situated. The place was a one-room store, full of character and personality, comfortable and relaxed and resembling a good friend's living room, with a plush sofa and scatter cushions. When I arrived, the store appeared to be closed -- but there was a whiteboard in the window with a hand-written announcement of my appearance, and a homemade sign with a small pile of books right inside the door. It seemed, from their website anyway, that I was the event that month -- and this was definitely not going to be one of those readings where I was ensconced behind a mike and a public service announcement was made for any vacillating browsers to kind of meander over if they felt like it. This thing was focused simply and solely on me.

I wandered off in search of coffee, and returned to the store about ten minutes or so before the event in question was due to begin. I entered through the now open door, and a woman seated behind the counter looked up at my step.

"Hello," she said brightly, shop-owner to customer, and then her face lit up. She rose to her feet and hurried over, hand extended. "HELLO! I recognise your hair! I'm Celia, the owner..."

Her husband, who had gone next door to borrow a glass for my water, returned a moment later with a brandy snifter, and a couple other people drifted in not too long after that -- one of them, according to the owners, an employee of the shop who had a list of interview questions to be put to me after the reading, said interview to be put up on their website.

This was definitely a focused event. When the time came to begin, the door of the shop was closed -- not locked to exclude anyone, but merely closed to shut out the noise of the street, and to discourage interruptions by meandering browsers. I did my reading; the interview questions were put to me and duly responded to, and then I shook hands with everyone, signed several copies of the stock, and then the owners themselves gave me a lift back into Denver to my hotel -- where I met another Internet friend for dinner. The two of us visited Boulder the next day.

Boulder is... eclectic (they have T-shirts that say "Keep Boulder Weird!" -- I approve!). It's full of statuary, and has a pedestrian mall that runs the width of the city, and a lovely creek running through parklands. By the creek is that glorious and astonishing edifice known as the Dushanbe Tea House -- it's a restaurant (not just a tea house), a gift to Boulder from its sister city of Dushanbe in Tajikistan. (How the heck did they manage to twin with a place like that? In any case, I am told they reciprocated with an Internet café, which apparently hasn't gone over half as well there as the Tea House has here...). We had lunch there, and the menu was as fantastic as the carved and painted and mosaic-laden building itself. Then we wandered down to the Boulder Bookstore, where my friend bought the very last copy of Jin-shei on their shelves, leaving the cashier scribbling down a note to remind the ordering department to get more.

We drove back to Denver later that afternoon, with the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains silhouetted against an improbable sky, deep violet in colour and streaked by the long strobed lightning of a distant mountain thunderstorm. Then it was back to the airport (where I saw a rabbit hopping around on the tarmac just outside the gates -- what does the thing eat, jet fuel?). My plane left at 8 PM. Taking into account travel time and time-zone skipping, by the time I staggered into my house that night, it was close to one o'clock in the morning, and I was a tired little traveller.

Somehow, no matter how exciting the journey, it's the coming home that makes you appreciate the places where you've been. And this has been quite a journey.

5 July 2004 Elliot Bay Book Company, Seattle WA

You know how you sometimes walk into a store (particularly a book store) and you recognize it immediately as "home" -- a place where you instantly and comfortably see yourself as belonging, and in which you could spend endless pleasant hours?

That was the feeling the Elliott Bay Book Company gave me when I first walked through its doors a handful of years ago, on a friend's recommendation. I wandered past the packed, eclectic shelves, dazzled by their bounty, trying to imagine a system which would enable people who worked here to know where anything at all was shelved, never mind knowing if it was physically present in the bookshop. It seemed one of those magic places where the book you want appears on the shelf as you reach out your hand, whether or not it was there the moment before.

In a word, I loved it, and it's been an icon in my bookshop pantheon ever since. And there are only a bare handful of those -- Elliott Bay finds itself in the company of such luminaries as the incomparable Powell's of Portland, and the glorious muddle that is Foyle's of London.

Doing a reading at Elliott Bay Book Company is -- well -- a little surreal. It's like knowing you're well and truly awake and also knowing that you simply have to be dreaming -- because belonging in a place like this, your right of residence determined by the fact that your book is on one of those magical shelves out there, is a bright and glorious thing.

When someone comes up to you after your reading and says that he works at the "other bookshop" (Barnes & Noble, I gather...) and that your book has made the "Staff Recommends" shelves in there, and someone else implies that this is the second reading that she's come to, there's this warmth right where your heart is. As a writer, I treasure these words of appreciation, for every one of them comes from a friend that my words have made.

Oh -- and happy birthday to me. I couldn't have asked for a better present than to be here.

Alma's Jin-shei tour is fueled by Starbucks Coffee