There is a road, no simple highway . . .

Today is day one of the road trip – Providence, Rhode Island.

I’m sitting in Blue State Coffee on Thayer Street, charging my ipod, phone, camera, and computer. I’ll be stealing power and internet often in the next few months.

When I last spent some time in Providence, I caught scabies while trying on overpriced retro jeans at a used clothing store on this same street—and that wasn’t even the worst part of the visit.

As far as I can tell, not much seems to have changed on Thayer street. The RISD girls’ pants are a little tighter, to the point of looking painted on, but that’s about the only difference I can see.

In the last couple weeks I’ve been trying to hang out with all my friends, and get copies of the book into stores around Brockton. DMR is now being sold in a few stores south of Boston. There’s a full list of them on One Tiny Pizza Publishing’s Web site. My Web designer (my little sister) will be updating the list every few days.

I didn’t get a chance to see all my friends and I’m not quite as prepared for this trip as I wish I was, but hopefully things will work out and I don’t catch scabies. It was nice to see the friends I was able to meet up with, and all of them were pretty positive about the road trip (one even baked me cookies!). Everyone is full of advice, and I’ve been trying to follow some of the better-sounding recommendations, but for the most part, I think I have to kinda figure this thing out on my own.

This morning, after buying a few last minute necessities, we began packing the van and didn’t finish until well into the afternoon. I left my house a few hours later than I’d planned, but it’s very difficult to pack a minivan (it seems important to stress the mini here) even if your press manager (my friend Allie) is like the best vehicle packer in the world. In addition to helping me pack, she repaired two holes in the ass of my jeans (the only jeans I’m bringing), and she agreed to send out a bunch of packages for me. I told her to make sure and take the packages, with copies of DMR inside, to the post office because they weigh over 13 ounces and can’t just be dropped into a mailbox even though they’re prepaid. It’s really gratifying to write a book that’s heavy enough to be considered a bomb threat.

After arriving here in Providence, the first bookstore I went to, Ada Books on Dean St., agreed to carry DMR. I’m happy to have the book in such a cozy and friendly store.

My goal is to get one bookstore in every city to carry the book, so my work was done early despite my late arrival. Since then, I’ve just been wandering around, checking out stores, and not spending any money because I don’t trust my budgeting skills.

I’ll be sleeping in the van tonight. It’s getting too late and windy to set up camp. Hopefully the curtains my friends and I fashioned out of sheets and Velcro will work well. I really don’t want people peeking in on me. And just in case, for protection, I have a baseball bat, a few knives, and a can of bear mace that will hopefully stop even the fattest and furriest would-be assailant.

In two days I’ll be backtracking north to Weymouth, MA (very close to Brockton) to attend a book release party for Dave Daniel, one of the writers in the writing group I belong to that meets in upstate New York every summer. His new book is called Reunion, and I’m looking forward to reading it. After that, I’ll be driving straight down the East Coast, one city at a time. So these next two days are kind of a dry run for me. I’ll be able to test out sleeping in the van and then have the option of going back home to grab anything I’ve forgotten. After that, this trip will probably feel a lot more daunting than it does right now.