“A conversation about earthquakes made me decide it’s time to tell the truth.” That’s both the opening sentence of my novel LOST MAN’S LANE and this ground-stop inspired confession.
A frequent question when one adds a pen name after writing 14 novels is: why? In my case, the answer may surprise: I intend to limit climate disasters.
The literary efforts of Michael Koryta have been subject to varied responses over the years, but the book tours have not been. There is one constant reaction, and it is authored by God and delivered to me by either my publicist or the good people of Delta Airlines.
My book tour is cursed.
I felt prepared for everything it could throw at me, a sentiment I shared confidently with my first editor. We were in an elevator in the Flatiron Building, the old offices of St. Martin’s Press, and my first novel was about to come out when he asked if I was ready to handle a book tour event where nobody showed up. This was, he warned, a scenario the debut novelist needed to consider. I assured him I could take it.
And you know what? I think I could. No-shows aren’t that bad.
One-shows are where they get you.
An event where exactly one person shows up, is, I assure you, decidedly worse than zero. The humiliation grows exponentially when you’re at a wonderful indie store whose delightful employees have not only put out 50 chairs, but also hung an impressive banner featuring your book cover, a banner sized appropriately for an inaugural address. In the face of such failure, there are two goals for the touring author: maintain graciousness, and make a quick exit, although not necessarily in that order.
Following the fifth or sixth intercom announcement of my event that boomed through the store without summoning a second audience member, I attempted to laugh the awkward situation off with my single fan and suggested I would be happy to sign his book and release him to the better things he could be doing with his time.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I still want to hear you read.”
And so I did. My first public reading was given for a solitary man who wore a fedora with a feather in the brim. I anticipated that my humbling had reached its crescendo for the evening, reading for a single person while shoppers carried on all around us, but alas, we weren’t quite to the climax. Upon the end of my reading, and the answering of quite a few questions from the man with the feathered fedora, my audience asked me to sign a galley copy of the book, and then made his way into the night, meaning I had somehow managed to do a reading, a Q&A, and signing without selling a single book.
I’ve heard a lot of tour horror stories over the years, every writer has them, but I’ve yet to encounter anyone else who has put up that particular hat trick.
At the conclusion of the event, the store employees took down the massive banner, rolled it up, and presented it to me as a gift. I could barely fit it into my car. I was still in college at the time, and my roommate absolutely delighted in the story of my night of woe, and promptly claimed the banner for himself. To the best of my knowledge, it is still somewhere in his garage, a trophy of my humiliation so sweet that he simply can’t bear to part with it.
It rained the night of that signing, which didn’t feel symbolic yet, but only because I wasn’t paying close enough attention. The universe had noted Michael Koryta book tours. The rain was merely a warmup. It took me a few years to notice this. While I once barreled through a freshly leveled Illinois town after a tornado, and on another occasion put a rental car into a full 180-degree spin on ice outside of a Hertz booth in Cleveland, I never perceived these events as a personal message. I was younger and duller in those days.
For my sixth novel, I changed publishers. I was at a crime-fiction conference known as Bouchercon when I spotted a lovely young woman listening to our panel discussion with unusually rapt attention. Finally, I thought, I was delivering the vaunted young-reader demographic! It turned out that she’d been paid to be there, and I remain in search of the younger-reader demographic. At the end of the event, she introduced herself and told me that she was with Little, Brown and Company and would be handling publicity for my next book. She was very confident that things would go smoothly. So confident that I didn’t have the heart to warn her.
Fifteen years later, a cursory review of emails from the book tours she handled for me turns up the words “blizzard” “hurricane” “heat record” “flooding” “power outage” and “ground stop.” Gmail is overmatched when I ask it to find references to canceled flights. There are simply too many.
I began to feel badly about accepting invitations to speaking events, knowing what I troubles might deliver to unsuspecting, innocent people. In Paris, there was a heat wave that crushed records. In Perth, Australia, a group of writers who took a boat trip to an island were encouraged to remain on the boat after the discovery of a troubling number of snakes sunning themselves on the shore. In Amsterdam, the signature tulips of the Keukenhof could scarcely be seen through the fog.
“This isn’t normal,” my Dutch publicist told me, and I tried to pretend that I agreed.
Even as the disaster trends that followed me began to gather some attention from others, I persisted in tempting fate. Once, leaving my home in Florida for a media lunch in New York, I decided to leave my laptop behind because I would be there only one night and wouldn’t have time to work. I also opted to brave the Manhattan March weather with only a light silk sport coat. Again, we were talking about only one day.
24 inches of snow fell in New York that day. The media lunch was cancelled – a fact I discovered only after making my trek through the snow in my sport coat, never once thinking that perhaps I should check my phone to ensure that plans remained intact. This was New York, I thought; nothing ever stopped, the city famously never sleeps.
The Michael Koryta book tour, however, had brought it to its knees. There was good news, though: with my flight home obviously cancelled, I had plenty of time to work. A shame I hadn’t packed my laptop.
Gradually, these things became easier to predict. By the time my plane returned to the jet bridge at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix because it was too hot to take off – yes, that is a thing, and I have since learned that it has to do with air density – I was generally sanguine about the developments. Last year, when sent to a writer’s festival in Toronto, I even called my shot, like the Babe Ruth of Disaster, warning both American and Canadian publicity departments that this would be a risky endeavor for them. There was some laughter over this – right up until the first million acres in Quebec and Ontario began to burn in wildfires, and the New York City skyline turned orange. Bear in mind, I was only connecting in New York.
Or at least that was then plan. A series of delays led to a missed connecting flight and left me in an absurdly overpriced yet equally terrible hotel near LaGuardia, awaiting a 6 a.m. departure for my second effort at reaching the festival. The morning flight was also delayed, but at least it took off, which was exciting progress, and it landed of the pilot’s volition, which never fails to delight me. I caught a cab to my hotel, thinking there was just enough time to shower and dress before my reading. This plan likely would have worked had the hotel not canceled my room the previous night when I failed to appear. There would be no shower or change of clothes while they sorted that out. Nothing if not resilient, I was content to take the stage at the outdoor venue in a T-shirt and jeans. And what a stage it was: this was a true concert venue, with speakers that towered like Stonehenge, overlooking a stunning waterfront park. Pearl Jam might have played there. It was perhaps the most beautiful spot I’ve ever had for a reading.
And a challenging one, because while the park was gorgeous, it was also quite active. Families were picnicking, a game of soccer was being played in one corner, and a man beside the stage was busking quite successfully – and loudly. I needed my A Game to grab the audience, and thus I went to a piece that I’d had good luck with previously, a comedic scene involving rock climbing.
Let me just say this of the Toronto effort: I’ll need to read that scene again somewhere else to create tiebreaker in wins and losses. It was the first, and I hope only, time that I’ve ever stopped reading to say: “Is anyone still following me?”
I’m proud to say two hands went up. I also do not think it matters in the least that one of them belonged to the publicist who was paid to be there with me, or that the other belonged to her daughter.
By the time the Canadian festival ran down, I was beginning to feel the fatigue of airport delays, sleepless nights, and abject failure. My flight home was departing at 7, which meant an early car from the hotel, and I was exhausted. I have received various bits of advice about how to handle a book tour over the years. The best I ever heard was: stay hydrated. More questionable was: get an Ambien prescription.
But insomnia has been a problem for me, and I now have an Ambien prescription, one that has generally treated me well while slowly eating my brain from the inside out. On my last night in Toronto, mentally and physically spent, I needed a good night of rest. I took the Ambien and turned the lights off.
Ambien is a rapid-onset drug, but its peak concentration in the blood occurs at around two hours after being ingested. I took mine at 10 p.m. It was almost exactly midnight when the hotel’s alarms blared to life and an employee thundered down the hall, pounding on doors, and shouting “EVACUATE, EVACUATE!”
I woke with the blend of focus, calm, and illusion of absolute alertness that have put Ambien users in tabloid headlines before. Part of this may have been the drug; part of it may have been my sense that, at this point in my travels, the latest development felt perfectly logical, if not inevitable. Of course we were evacuating a hotel in the middle of the night. It was the only progressive complication that remained for the narrative.
I’d already packed my bags for the early flight, and so I got dressed, donned my sport coat, and stepped into the hallway with my backpack on and roller bag in hand to discover a confused crowd in pajamas and bathrobes waiting on the elevators. What they needed, it was clear, was a leader.
With a calm decisiveness I would never be able to match with an unaltered bloodstream, I spoke up and announced that the elevators would not be functioning while the fire alarms were on, so we would need to take the stairs. Somehow, I came across as compelling, because the crowd followed me quite readily. I led my newfound flock directly to the stairwell. I was aware of its location thanks to a childhood of travel with an electrical engineer father, an experience that turned me into one of these people who looks at the maps in hotel rooms to locate the nearest exit. It probably doesn’t reflect well on my family’s hotel preferences that my father always felt a fire escape was worth finding early in your stay, but the habit lingers.
On this night in Toronto, I had no trouble finding the stairs and leading my contingent down them. By now I was feeling both the uniquely confident buzz of the Ambien and the adrenalized euphoria of having followers. I directed my pajama-clad battalion into the parking lot, where we were greeted by numerous fire trucks and police cars. While the emergency responders were going in, the hotel employees were coming out, and one of them turned, looked up, pointed at a high-floor window, and shouted: “there he is.”
Indeed, there was a figure silhouetted in one of the windows. It is perhaps as much a reflection of being an American as anything else that when a few people worried aloud that the man in the window might be someone preparing to jump, I encouraged them to back away in case he had firing angles. My first thought was of Mandalay Bay.
A lesson learned: If you want to reassure a crowd, the phrase “firing angles” is not the best way to go about it. The crew from my floor began to scatter, with three women heading for shelter in the parking garage that made up the bottom floor of the hotel. Someone else said that was a good idea. My response to this man?
“It won’t be a good idea if the building collapses.”
It was around this time that I inexplicably began to lose the support of my followers. Having retreated alone to a place well out of sight, near the water, I decided to text my wife some reassuring words. This is the actual text message I sent to her after explaining the evacuation: “I feel safe – there’s zero guidance but I’ve eliminated firing lines and put myself near the water. I don’t want to get in the water unless I can shake the Ambien. I’m not anticipating anything but a night of lost sleep, but if anything changes and you lose contact with me, reach out to Richard in the morning and take his advice.”
The Richard mentioned is Richard Pine, my literary agent. I hope he feels properly appreciated in knowing that, in the event of my disappearance in another country, I would instruct my wife to contact him first. Who needs police when you have InkWell Management? If ever there were an endorsement of faith in agent, it is contained in that text message. If ever there were an indictment of Ambien, it might be shared in the same words, but, hey, at least I was reluctant to enter the water, although what possible gain might have come from that action eludes me.
My wife, of course, was sound asleep for the whole ordeal, so that message didn’t reach her until 5:30 the next morning, at which point I was already in my Uber, headed to the airport. Reading back through that exchange, I see this one from her: “I think you should do only Zoom events from now on.”
It is probably a benevolent idea, considering that within a week of my visit, Toronto had the worst air quality in the entire world. I feel badly about that. They had no way of knowing what my visit would cost.
When I was back home, the wonderful Canadian publicist who arranged the whole affair e-mailed me to request Uber receipts for reimbursement. I never sent that one in. It seemed like I should pay for something, considering the havoc I’d brought to her fair city. Koryta had taken to the road. The results were predestined.
And yet I love book tours. What to do?
Enter Scott Carson. We’ll see if the universe can be fooled by name alone.