Alert! Alert! Author sighting, author sighting!!!

Yes, I fly out tonight to Kansas City, going to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come (also the place everything’s up to date in). This is for the Kansas City Literary Festival, an all-day orgy of readers, writers and books. There are five stages featuring culinary presentations, kids’ activities, books for sale, and writers and poets galore (click on the link for an alphabetical list). Location, location, location, and best of all it is absolutely FREE to all comers. If you like to read and you’re within driving distance of KC, this is where you want to be this Saturday. See you there!

Here is where you can see me doing what:

Friday, May 16
10am
I’ll be dropping by the I Love a Mystery Bookstore.

Noon
I’ll be on Fox 4 News at Noon.

2pm
Central Resource Library for a presentation and signing. I don’t know what I’m going to do here yet, I want to get a feel for what the crowd wants. My talk called ‘The Gift,’ the one about my mom, the one that never fails to make grown men cry? My First Lines workshop? Q&A? There might also be a very nice door prize, donated by yours truly. Show up and see!

6:30pm
LitFest Reception at the Linda Hall Library. Hang out with all the literary folk attending the LitFest. I promise not to bite if you ask me where I get all my ideas.

Saturday
1:10-1:40pm, Specialty Stage, Country Club Plaza
Me and Nancy Pickard mix it up. She’s always fun, who knows what we’ll do?

1:45pm-3pm
Signing

5:20pm-6:10pm, Main Stage, Country Club Plaza
I give my “Low Tide and Libraries” talk, the one that never fails to make grown librarians cry. It’s about growing up on a boat in the Gulf of Alaska and climbing the 42-foot ladder to the dock to go to the Seldovia Public Library, one musty room in the basement of the City Hall that was heaven and haven for me in my childhood.

Then I get to go have dinner with librarians, bound to be a blast because librarians are some of my favorite people, and then home again, home again.

Hope to see you there!

First up is Susan Alameda holding up A Cold-blooded Business in front of the theatre sign in Ashland, Oregon. A gorgeous place with a great Shakespeare Festival, I’ve been there myself a couple of times. Once I saw a production of Titus Andronicus scary enough to freeze my blood, and another time I saw The Tempest with an Ariel who talked with his feet. Might have been her feet. Didn’t really matter.

Next is, hmm. Well, the photographer suggested the caption, “Even artichokes read Dana Stabenow.” What’s puzzling me is why artichokes would like Blood Will Tell, specifically. One never knows what’s up with vegetables…

Also, the audio interview from the CD version of Prepared for Rage is now a podcast on Dana’s Odeo page.

Okay, here’s something to do with nothing else, but I think it’s tres kewl. I read an article in the New York Times Magazine about cell phones maybe ending global poverty, where this Nokia guy goes around to third-world countries and watches people live and figures out what they need to make their lives better (I want that job). It’s a fascinating story, or rather stories–the guy who got the Nobel for funding microbusinesses has started a cell phone company in Bangladesh where women buy a cell with a special battery for $150 and then set up in business as their village’s telephone service, and a guy in Nairobi has figured out how to send money to his mom back home in the village using a prepaid cell phone card. Nokia sponsored a contest for some of these folks to design their dream phones, and Business Week wrote a story about it and you can see pictures and descriptions of them here. The Nokia guy also has a blog here. The one that really gets me is the cell phone the 11-year old designed to keep track of her mom.

Whenever I think we’ve had it as a race, somebody like Jan Chipchase (and a business like Nokia) comes along and proves me wrong.

Mt. Augustine steaming away at sunrise. This is what’s out my front window this morning. It amazes me I ever get any work done. Photo is from one of the web cams on the island, via the Alaska Volcano Observatory website, where there are more photos and maps and you can look up recent earthquakes and learn how to collect ash samples, if you were so inclined.

Just finished the first chapter of Liam5, aka Bones out of the Grave, and starting on the second. I think this is going to be one of the good ones, folks, all the usual suspects return and I’ve just introduced Wy to Damon Wolfe, a sexy movie star type on a fishing vacation in Alaska who I have just decided is going to be a recurring character.

If I don’t kill him off first. Which, as you know, I am prone to do on occasion…