About to go to bed here in my hotel room in New Orleans and wake up tomorrow to head off to Atlanta for two events. If you live there please come out and hear me read and let me sign a book for you. Check my blog for the exact addresses and times but I’ll be at Borders Buckhead on Monday night April 2nd (introduced by E. Lynn Harris) and at Outwrite on Tuesday night April 3rd. It should be fun. Looking forward to it.

Yesterday here in New Orleans I ran into my old buddy, Bobby Harling, the playwright and screenwriter (Steel Magnolias, etc.) and we had a nice lunch and caught up with each other. Then later in the day I signed books at Faulkner House Books located on Pirate’s Alley in the French Quarter in the townhouse where Faulkner lived in 1925 when he wrote his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay. When I had a pied-a-terre here in the late ’90s, I’d wander down that Alley almost every day and look through Faulkner House’s stalls and once even a generous buddy of mine - I could have never afforded it at that point in my life - bought me a first edition of Miss Welty’s A Curtain of Green short story collection I spotted there when we were strolling around. It is one of my most cherished possessions. It had always been a dream of mine to have a book sold at Faulkner House and to have one that I was able to sign there also was an added dream come true. We sold a lot of books in the two hours I sat back at the desk of the owner, the dapper and personable and literarily astute Joe DeSalvo. And if you’re ever in there yourself say hello to saleslady Joanne Sealy who reigns over the place in her sexy, effervescent way. She’s a hoot’n'hottie, as one of my uncles liked to describe his favorite type of woman. One of the customers who came in was a Mr. Frank Thiemonge from down around Mobile, Alabama, who had driven over to New Orleans with his lovely wife for the weekend. He had wandered into the store and told me he had seen me the week before on a morning Mobile television show when I was promoting my previous book signing over in Fairhope. Frank was what we’d lovingly call down in these parts a Good Ole Boy. He bought a book and asked me to pose for a picture his wife took of the two of us. “Ah’m a’gonna be proud t’put this picture between the two of me with Percy Sledge and Freddy Fender. Yessiree.” That was one of the best compliments I’ve gotten on the southern swing of this book tour. Thanks, Frank. And thank you, Joe, for having me in your legendary book shop.

Later last night I put on a tie and made my way over to the W Hotel in the French Quarter for a charity book signing event that my agent at CAA, Rich Green, had put together to benefit the rebuilding of the library post-Katrina at the Martin Luther King, Jr., High School. I got to meet and hang out with Donna Tartt (she’s as chic and beautiful as she is talented) and Michael Lewis and Mark Childress and Ace Atkins and Frank Turner Hollon and Christopher Rice. It made me feel like a real writer hanging with all those folks. Go to Amazon or your local bookstores and look up their works and buy some. They are all so talented and I was flattered to be included in that flock. Later, Donna and Mark and Christopher and I met up with director John Waters, who was in town to speak at the Tennessee Williams Festival going on this weekend, at a French Quarter dive almost as legendary in New Orleans as Joe DeSalvo’s bookstore. It’s a bar called the Corner Pocket. Let’s just say it is gloriously sleazy and an appropriate way to end a weekend devoted to the memory of Tennessee Williams since it was one of his favorite places to imbibe and, unembarrassingly, ogle the goods. What kind of goods? Let’s just say perhaps I should have spelled that “unem- Bare Ass - ingly.”

Today, Palm Sunday - Jesus What a Segue!,which kind of sounds like a title in-and-of-itself of a gospel song that Frank Thiemonge might have sung in four-part harmony with Percy and Freddy and me - Bobby Harling and I met up with a couple of friends for brunch after church. Our mutual pal, Vogue writer extraordinaire Julia Reed, a fellow Mississippian who four years ago married a handsome sweetheart of a local lawyer down here and is almost finished refurbishing a Garden District mansion directly across the street from Chris Rice’s mama’s old house, had been scheduled to usher at their local Presbyterian Church. So we all met up at a restaurant after the service in their neighborhood and had gumbo and fried oysters and laughed a lot. In addtition to all her Vogue work, Julia, an inspiration not only as a prose stylist but also for her proficiency, is working on a book about Katrina and New Orleans for Harpercollins and is then doing a collection of all her food columns that ran the New York Times Magazine for my editor at St. Martins, Michael Flamini. Check out her collection of essays, Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomenon, as well as the introduction she wrote for the beautifully produced coffee table tome of artist William Dunlap’s work called Dunlap, an ironically succinct title for a book about such a charmingly loquacious fellow as Bill. I even ran into an old Jackson buddy, Patti Carr Black, at the restaurant during our brunch and hugged her neck. It’s been like old home week down here and I’ll be sad to leave tomorrow.

But leave I must. Can’t wait to meet all you folks over in Atlanta. Please come out and introduce yourselves to me. We’ll have a blast at my readings. And keep spreading the word about the book. I want to stay on the New York Times Bestseller List as long as possible. With your help, I plan on it. I don’t want to lose the traction I’m getting while out here on the road. And I’m still trying to navigate the shoals and currents at Amazon. So keep telling your friends to place their orders there as well. Now time to hit the sack and have another dream about my dog Archie. That’s been the hardest part of the tour: missing him. In another week I’ll be back in New York for a few days and can cuddle up with Archie as I go to sleep at night instead of the extra pillow in another hotel room’s misnamed double bed.