Have you seen my schedule?  For the last year, I have been burning up the roadways and airways promoting Silver Sparrow.  It has been an amazing experience, but I am tired, y’all. Tired.  I am sure there must be a french word for when you are exhausted and delighted at the same time. I am basically done with the road in August and I need some Tayari Time.

There are two types of Tayari Time.  The first will be an old fashioned vay-cay.  I thought about checking myself into a fitness retreat where you work out, eat vegetables, and drink water– basically de-tox.  No doubt such a regimen would do me good after eating nothing but room service for about three months straight.  But for some reason, a brocoli kale smoothie experience seemed too much like work.  So, as a gift to myself, I booked myself a week in Antigua where I will do nothing but lay up.  I will not take my manuscript with me.  I will not hit the gym while I am there.  I am taking my big floppy hat and a dozen paperbacks.  I will drink pina coladas at the swim-up bar.

But there is the other sort of Tayari Time and that involves my writing.  I confess that I do hardly any writing on the road.  I have tried.  Other writers have given me helpful hints, but when I am on tour, I am bringng my A-game to my events and when I make it back to my hotel, I fall face-first into bed.

Luckily, I had a sabbatical in January and I am going to apply to various artists colonies for the months of February and March.  I have been to a few colonies in the past and I find that I work really well in the peaceful settings provided by such retreats.  I am going to apply to Ucross because I have heard such good things about it.  And besides, I have never been to Wyoming.  I’ll also apply to MacDowell because it’s my favorite.

Does anyone have any recommendations about where a writer can go to recharge?

Yesterday, I spent the weekend in Los Angeles to give readings from Silver Sparrow at Eso Won Bookstore and the Los Angeles Times Festival of the Book.  For both events, I wore the shoes you see pictured here.  I know they aren’t much to look at.  They’re not red-bottoms, or Jimmy Choo’s.  But when I bought them, about twelve years ago, they were a real investment.  When I was in graduate school, I was an obsessive bargain hunter.  I was poor as a little mouse—living on approximately $1,200 a month.  I saw these shoes at some closeout store.  I still remember the description—Via Spiga, open-toe slingback, croco-embossed.  That last phrase, croco-embossed, really got me.  I was in shoe love.  But the cost– $73! It was such an indulgence.  I decided to buy them because I was giving a reading from my work-in-progress (Leaving Atlanta!) and I wanted to look nice.  I felt vain and silly for spending so much on a pair of shoes I was convinced I would never wear again.  Afterall, how often did I need to look nice? I was just a young woman with no money, chasing this writing dream.

I remembered this as I packed the shoes because I had left them behind last month when I traveled to New York to speak at the Harvard Club.  It was sort of a pain to get them back.  My assistant, Sarah, had to call half a dozen people to find them, and then there was the cost to have them overnighted.  And face it, the shoes really aren’t that fabulous.  Inside they are a little worn, so my feet slip in them and after a few hours my baby toe hurts.  But I can’t give up on my croco-embossed sling backs.

It’s not that they are a reminder of how far I’ve come, though is it nice to look at them that way.  But I like to think they remind me that I’ve always had my own back.  I bought myself a pair of fancy shoes although that negative voice that lurks in my head told me I didn’t deserve them, that I would never need them again.  That I shouldn’t get accustomed to speaking in public.   When I bought them, the negative voice told me that I was vain and shallow.  But the real story is that I invested in myself.  That I had a feeling that maybe the best was yet to come.