I could have used another week to get ready for my 66-city book tour in my custom camper van. But, most likely, I would have said this no matter how much time I’d had to prepare. As it was, I got on the road after only a few hours’ sleep. Packing everything I might need for a month — into the tiny nooks and cabinets of my camper van — took longer than I had expected, even though I had started packing three days before taking off.

This first leg lasts one month and takes me down to New Orleans and back. Cleo, our basset hound, is with me. She’s such a good sport, always wagging her tail, always ready to hop out and explore. Right now she’s curled up on her bed just outside the van — on the asphalt. We’re parked in a Walmart lot and I’m writing this at the table of my tiny kitchen. It’s 1:00 AM and the lot is all but deserted. In the distance, I can hear the sputter of an RV’s generator. My generator makes no noise because it is solar-powered: four big panels on the roof. I’ll tell you all about the RV Walmart scene at another time.

It’s been a rough first few days because, as I said, I got started without sleep. Then a TV show I had lined up in Charleston changed my appearance date, so I had to drive from Raleigh, NC, to Charleston, SC for a 3-minute TV interview to promote my Thursday appearance in Charleston. Then I drove back to Raleigh for another reading — a seven hour round trip. So, for the second day, I once again got only a few hours of sleep.

I’m not much good when I’m sleepy. This may explain how I came to blow up the water tank under my camper van. The van, by the way, is very cool and everything is working well, except now I have no water — which means I can’t use the toilet. I hate having to hunt for a toilet.

I connected a hose to my water tank in order to fill it for the first time but I forgot to open my faucet, and so the pressure (65 PSI) built up in the tank. Before the tank was 1/4 full, it burst, sounding like the muted blast of a small cannon. Vaporized water drifted like smoke from the tank’s ruptured seams. I was so weary, I reacted with no more than a shrug, as if to say, “Oh, well, I guess I f**ked up.” My welder says he can fix it when I pit-stop in Baltimore at the end of the month.

As for other complications, my May bookings are half-baked because too many of them were late or last-minute due to the fact that, in booking May, we were relying on the book stores to be more responsive. Too many of them were very slow in getting back, which meant we were late getting to the preservation societies, which meant that there was little or no room on propsective supporters’ calendars. Which means that the people who should have and would have come out to see me were not able to. In short, May taught me to by-pass the book stores for subsequent bookings and go straight to the preservation socieites, which are really responsive and eager to support an event like mine.

Delayed bookings put everything behind, which means I didn’t get time to send out e-mail blasts and mine social media. I’ll scramble to do that this week. And what exactly is “an event like mine”? It’s a comic monologue with a slide show. It’s entertaining and of wide appeal. I say that in all modesty. Not only would you like it, but your mother and her friends would like it too.

I should mention that, as I’m traveling to 66 cities in 30 states, I am making a documentary called “Preseving America,” about preservationists and their work. Which means I’m video-interviewing these people. Not that I have time for that. But it does make the trip more interesting.

Finally, my plan to stay at campgrounds will not work, I have discovered, because state and national campgrounds close at night. Did you know this? I mean, they shut their gates at 9:00 PM. That means that, after my reading, I can’t get back to the campground in time, especially when most campgrounds are about 10 miles from town. I could stay in commercial campgrounds but they cost $35-$50. a night. I can’t spend that kind of money to park someplace. So here I am, at Walmart.

Tonight I’m in Charleston. I got good PR here — TV, newspaper, etc. — so it should be interesting to see what the turn-out will be. Should I mention that last night at the Columbia, S.C., Barnes & Noble not a single person showed up?

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When I sit in Vinny’s Marathon I feel transported to a time when construction mattered and things were built to last and that meant that the builders took great pride in what they did. I know this is a nostalgic cliche but there it is: being in a well-kept old car makes me feel like the world is better place

Vinny has put about $20K into his Marathon. If you’re going to bring back an old car, you can’t go halfway. After the hard time I had with my ‘66 Valiant, I vowed never to get another old car. But recently, I bought a used Sprinter van for my 66-city Animal House book tour and have been going through the entire old car rehab routine to makle it into a custom camper: body work, paint, interior renovation, the works. It’s been like taking on a huge old house project.


The satisfaction of a car rehab is that you get it exactly the way you want it. Fixing up the Sprinter reminds me of fixing up the old Volkswagen van I had in college. I love the idea of begin wholly self-contained in a tiny house on wheels. But, really, I never thought I’d be doing it again. Our new old van will have just about everything, including a toilet. I’m amazed that so small a vehicle can hold and do so much. When it’s done, I’ll show it to you right here.

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I was relieved about this (no pun). I like to know where my music comes from. My head is always filled with music. I mean, I have a sound track playing all the time. And it’s a good one, though limited to the music I’ve heard most often. Although I don’t have perfect pitch, I have a sharp ear for sounds and, as a result, I hear tunes exactly as they sound on the radio or an MP3 player. This may explain why I don’t walk around listening to an MP3 player.

In elementary school music class, which met once a week, I was made aware of my sensitivity to sound when we were told to listen to recorded instruments and guess what they were. After our initial introduction to each instrument — everything from oboe to mouth harp — I never guessed wrong. Even when listening to a symphony, I could pick out which instrument was playing each part. Had I been given some encouragement, I might have played an instrument other than the drums. But our music teacher, the notorious child-hating Mr. Harvey, encouraged nobody to do anything.

My head is full of hymns too. These are Protestant hymns from my childhood. They come to me unbidden and, really, I don’t mind them. One from my recent playlist is “My Father’s World.” Its lyrics are fitted to a traditional English tune. The age of the tune probably accounts for its strength. Here’s a traditional example, if you care to listen. And here’s Christian pop star Amy Grant’s version.

I have long assumed that everybody has a non-stop music player in his or her head. But is this true? Maybe you have something different. I can’t really turn mine off. It’s just there, ever playing. I can change the selection but not always, like the other day when the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing” was stuck in there for too long. Sometimes I have to give in and sing the song — loudly. The good thing is that I can update my selections. One of my favorite fairly recent additions is Nada Surf’s “Always Love.”

I should add that my internal player is no match for the real thing. By “real,” I mean full spectrum sound that comes from a CD on a good stereo system. I recall the days when my friends and I would simply sit for hours and listen to music on the stereo. It was our work, actually — what you were supposed to do as a teenager. I’m not sure what youngsters do nowadays. That is, I don’t imagine they gather to listen to music like this because nowadays each is in his or her own pod. Is that a good thing?

My parents didn’t listen to music, though my mother played piano and has a lovely singing voice. I got the impression that, once you were a grown-up, you were supposed to give up music. We Baby Boomers defide that rule. I still buy CDs to support the bands I like. And I compress them for portable play too, though I don’t like the MP3 format. I’m happy to say that, when I’m listening to music outside my head, the player inside goes silent.

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It’s a good word. By “good,” I mean a word that does the work it’s made for. If you believe in progress, you should conclude that f**k — the expletive — is the product of arduous field-testing and development. Centuries of testing. No other English word comes close to expressing abject outrage and frustration. I use it whenever my work around the house goes awry. I start with “Oh my f**king God!” then end with “Oh just f**k me!” This may go on for a while. It’s quite therapeutic.


If we didn’t have f**k, we’d have to invent it. Therein lies the irony of every objection to the word. Saying “snap!” or “fudgedragon!” just isn’t going to cut it. Any honest person will admit as much. For all their good intentions, those who prefer a substitute are playing a fool’s game: in saying “fudge,” the speaker derives satisfaction not from voicing the innocuous replacement but, rather, from thinking of the real word, f**k, and then reveling in the fact that he/she hasn’t said it aloud. Fudge is to f**k what methadone is to heroin. You’re still using an expletive; it’s just not a very good one.


All of this came to mind recently when Jill and I watched the first few episodes of the HBO series, “Boardwalk Empire.” The show features Steve Buschemi as an Atlantic City crime boss in the 1920s. It has a good cast, lavish sets, and producer Martin Scorcese. But, by the third episode, I tired of the show for two reasons: I didn’t really care about the characters (I need somebody to root for) and everybody was saying f**k a lot. I mean a lot. This struck me as wholly unrealistic.

Granted, gangster types nowadays say f**k in every sentence. But do you really think that 1920s-era gangsters did this? No doubt they enjoyed saying f**k, but society and its constraints were such that one f**k went a long way. When 1920s-era gangsters said f**k, they probably said it only when it really meant something. On “Boardwalk Empire,” they say it with every breath: “I don’t fucking know, but I think he’s fucking making a mistake. Right? Let’s fucking get out of here.”



I remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s when stand-up comedians started saying f**k a lot in their monologues. A typical opening would go something like this: “I was fucking sleeping, okay? And then I woke up and fucking thought, ‘What the fuck?’ I found myself in a fucking Dumpster, fucking reeking of puke and pee….” It got old fast because f**k became a kind of bad-ass place holder instead of a powerful expletive. And its overuse suggested that this new generation of comics lacked the confidence to sail solo. They needed to say f**k a lot to keep their audience off guard.


That’s the problem with “Boardwalk Empire”: the actors seem unsure of their dialogue and so, to make it stick, they keep saying f**k, as if this anachronistic over-usage would jar us into thinking we’re in the company of some really bad-ass 1920s-era gangsters. But, actually, f**k’s overuse only makes me feel that I’m in the company of writers who have little imagination.


I didn’t start saying f**k until I was eighteen. That’s how I was brought up. But, man, when I finally started using the word, I felt its power and used it accordingly. Which is to say: I used it when it really meant something. In short, I won’t overuse because I respect the word for the good work it does. There’s still a certain novelty to hearing a child say f**k, but it seems it won’t be novel for long because f**k is becoming as common among youngsters as crap was in my day. So, yes, I worry about the demise of this formidable word, even as I acknowledge that it is probably too late to wonder, Are we wearing out f**k?

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I am surprised and a little disturbed when I hear memoir writers say that they have altered some chronology and combined some people in their nonfiction in order to make the story more manageable. They defend these choices by insisting that they have been “true” to the story and have left untouched all the important details. This rationalization changes the essence of the “non” in “nonfiction,” doesn’t it? Granted, it’s understood that writers of nonfiction reconstruct dialogue to the best of their recollection and describe events as well as they can remember. The memoir is, at bottom, a form of testimony, as if to say, “This is what I heard, saw, and felt as best as I can recount it.” But this is not a license to make things up. Life is messy enough without the writer fudging the details and hiding the fact that, say, “Uncle Tim” is actually a conmbination of Uncle Timothy, Uncle Simon, and Aunt Clara.

Had I written FROM ANIMAL HOUSE TO OUR HOUSE as fiction, I would have

1) made the roof cave in (only three ceilings were falling in),
2) made the contractors more bizarre than they were (the beer-drinking roofers, one of whom nearly died, were the worst we had to deal with)
3) made my family’s first, too-early Christmas visit even more disastrous than it was (I would have made someone fall through the floor, for instance, and added even more extended family to make it more chaotic),
4) created at least one thoroughly eccentric neighbor, to add some local color
5) brought back some frat boys (only one returned and I nearly attacked him when he did),
6) and made the fights between Jill and me even more volatile (we had plenty of arguments but we never separated).

As it happened, just as Jill and I began working on that old, wrecked frat house, my life at work was imploding. In the original draft of From Animal House to Our House, I tried to connect my travails at work with my travails at home. But, really, there was little or no connection to be made. And, honestly, the story of my working life wasn’t that interesting, even though it was complicated and often ugly. The result was that the story I had to tell — about Jill and me in a wrecked frat house — got muddled. That’s why, in the first round of submissions, no publisher would take the book. They didn’t want to deal with that mess.

So I had a choice: change the story or leave some of it out. Since I was writing non-fiction, I chose to do the latter and simply left out the story of my working life. All writers understand the need to be selective: you can’t tell everything. Now, when you read From Animal House to Our House (as I hope you will), you’ll find a fast read that focuses on a newly romanced couple taking on an impossible task: why they survive it? If so, how?

I left out other things too, like the details of my second marriage, some of which were so disturbing they would have distracted the reader. That’s the challenge of writing non-fiction: you have to keep the reader focused. Just because it happened in your life doesn’t mean you are obliged to tell about it. When in doubt, leave it out.


Although I think I’m getting more comfortable writing nonfiction, it continues to bedevil me because nothing is messier than real life. Sorting through that mess to make sense of one or two things will always be a daunting task, it seems. But then I remind myself, Who would want a life that’s so simple, there’s nothing to sort through?

For more before/after pics of the house, click here.

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My last class of the day, publishing and editing, is a lab class. I’ve been teaching in the university’s media lab for four years. No big deal. But today, as the hour neared, I was puzzled. Nobody was showing up. Then, right at class time, one student did. He introduced himself. i invited him to sit at the computer next to me. After he checked his email, he said, “Oh, no — have I made a mistake? Class was at 3:00.” It was now 4:35. I felt my face burn with the realization that, for the first time ever, I had missed a class. Missed it by a mile. Every department has a professor who does this routinely: the feckless, marginally competent oldster who miraculously has managed to keep his job despite his laughable reputation. But I’m NOT that guy. I’m Mr. Reliable. I’m the guy who gets things done, the guy who follows through. But not today. No, right here, right now, I was, I am, that Mr. Clueless.


Later, Jill tried to make me feel better by reminding me of other lapses I’ve made when overworked, like the time I showed up for a radio interview a day early (that’s more my style). Buy I’m NOT overworked. I’m not distracted. I wasn’t unprepared. And I didn’t forget. I just assumed that this lab class, like the six others I’d taught, was scheduled for 4:30 PM. Was that hubris? Ironically, it appears that my chair was trying to do me a favor by scheduling the class earlier in the day.


Years ago, a mistake like this would have freaked me out; I mean, I’d be due for a week of sleepless nights. I’ve learned that in making mistakes, there’s not much to be learned from dwelling on it or picking at it like a scab. I sent a note to the students. It was a funny note and an authoritative note — you can’t let something like this shake you. It’s like discovering your fly is down while you’re making a speech. Just zip it up and carry on. So I’m carrying on.


But here’s the rub. In order to teach well and exact as much work from students as possible, you can’t make a big mistake like this. Now, the advantage is theirs. Whether consciously or not, they know it and they will use it. In short: I OWE them. So I have to make the best of it and take what comes and hope that I teach so hard and so well that these gentle souls will forget all about this first day, when — unbeknownest to them –I was in my office eagerly prepping for a class I would not get to teach.

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You might wonder why it’s so time-consuming. Here’s our strategy: 1) we target the best-bet indie book store in a particular town, then we query the local historic and preservaiton socieites in that town to co-sponsor the reading. The historic/preservation socieites have been really enthusiastic about my visit because, as a licensed home-inspector and a hard-core Do-it-yourselfer, I am offering a lot of value for free: workshops, talks, slide-shows about my experience restoring our big old house and other stuff relating to restoration etc. Jill and I have been building our expertise on YouTube through how-to videos. And we run the Houselove website, which has a national readership. In other words, the book represents a convergence of other efforts and interests, which now all come into play.

2) Once we enlist the partnership of the local historic/preservation society in a particular town, we tell the targeted book store that we have local support. You’d be surprised how many book stores don’t think this is enough. Some want to know if I have family or friends in that town and ask for even more guarantees. You’d think it’d be a no-brainer to book me — and my general-readership book — in a small store when we’re offering so much (see items that follow). We enlisted the partnership of TWO historic societies for a proposed reading at Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, and still Powell’s rejected us. They said we would not draw enough.

I know times are hard. But short of signing an affidavit swearing that we’ll bring a tour-bus load of supporters, what more can we do? And what are the skittish book stores doing on that particular night if they’re not bringing in, say, David Sedaris? All we’re asking is that they give us some space, put the event on their calendar, and send the word around. We’ll do the rest. In the case of Portland, we are going to create an event for the two historic societies and, chances are, we’ll get more press than we would for a book store reading. But my preference is to anchor these in indie book stores because I believe in indie book stores. We writers can help — or try to help — indie book stores, but the indie stores have to be willing to give us a chance.

3) Once we have the historic/preservation societies partnered with the book store, we go to the local press to see if we can get a book review. Then we go to local radio and TV to set up an interview the day-of or the day before. Believe it or not, getting on local morning TV talk shows is not difficult because they’re always scrambling for material, especially if the topic — like old house restoration — has local appeal. Next, we search out the local book clubs and see if we can get them interested.

4) Then we post the event in the local media outlets and calendars. All told, this booking/PR process takes at least a month to work through for each city. And this has to be done at least 3 months in advance for every city. And we’re doing 66 cities. It begs the question: who has time for this? The answer is simple: NOBODY! I certainly couldn’t do it without my dedicated media liaison. And this kind of effort really doesn’t make sense for every book. It will work best for the general-readership book. From Animal House to Our House is a good fit because it has a love story and an HGTV/TOH angle and a David Vs. Goliath inspirational angle and an Animal House angle. I don’t know that I’ll ever have another book that hits as many targets. And, frankly, that’s a relief because it makes my head swim to think of doing this again.

5) Other promotional gambits involve my writing articles for old house magazines like Victorian Homes, present at DIY shows, and give talks at preservation conferences. Further, it helps to get home-town press interestedin the story with interviews and photoshoots. We have a magazine photographer coming over tomorrow for an all-day shoot. Local interest has worked well in my case: look for articles in the Urbanite, Baltimore magazine, and maybe an excerpt in Style. Then an appearance on Dan Roderick’s mid-day talk show on Feb. 2 (from 1-2:00 PM). And more, I hope.

In sum, the idea is to bring all of these forces together so that word-of-mouth carries the name of your book far and wide. Notice that I haven’t mentioned book reviews? Book reviews are the wild card in this game. For an indie-press book, you can never tell who will consider it worth a review. And that’s the primary advantage of having a big-press book: the big magazines and newspapers are much more likey to pick it up.

As for the 66-city tour, mine may be the last of its kind. The world is transitioning to something else when it comes to book promotion, although none of us knows quite that that something might be. I’ve heard people tout the podcast or the video-cast or the guest blog as the way to go, but can any of these virtual efforts truly replace the power and gratification of a face-to-face meeting with readers in a town you’ve traveled to for the express purpose of making something good happen when a writer meeds curious strangers?

If you’re interested in camper van conversions, here’s a video link to my latest installment on that project.

If you want to see the shape of the 66-city tour thus far, click here.

If you still haven’t seen the FROM ANIMAL HOUSE TO OUR HOUSE video trailer, you really must.

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