How to order signed copies of Under The Stars, and my December update.

Thanks so much for checking in! I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted. Thank you for your stories and questions and your continued support. For starters, I just want to respond to the people who have left me messages in various places asking how to get a signed copy of Under The Stars. I am glad to say that you can order signed copies through Bookshop Santa Cruz – and here is the link. If you wish, you can also ask me to write something specific in the copies you order. All you do is fill in the requested inscription in the comments section after placing the order. Unless it is an extremely off-color limerick, or something libelous, I will write anything you like.

 

I’ll be honest with you. I have not gone camping since Mother’s Day, when my little family and I went to Napa and we got flooded out. This was my doing. I brought a tarp like I was supposed to do, but I tarped off the bottom of the tent, and then the rain came dumping down, and then, what do you know, the rain sluiced off the sides of the tent, dribbled onto the tarp beneath the tent, and before you know it, we had a nice big freezing-cold lakelet forming within the tent, engulfing some of our possessions. All in all, we had a good time, and my family knows to expect the unexpected when they camp with me. But it just seemed like a good opportunity to brush up on my technical skills.

 

In the meantime, I’ve been going all over the place, reading from Under The Stars. I read for a very large crowd at the California of Academy of Sciences.  They had a couple of pop-up bartender booths set up in strange places – near the albino alligator, for instance. People were drinking Fireball cinnamon whiskey in front of the penguin exhibit. They were in a very good mood for the reading, in other words. I’ve read in all sorts of other places — outside, on a restaurant patio, at the office of a literary magazine, and at an elementary school, where one of the students asked how it felt to have spent a decade of my life working on two books. “Very strange!,” I replied. I also returned to my hometown for a reading, and had a good crowd at the library out in Thousand Oaks.

 

I’ll have more info for you very soon about upcoming readings – at a church in San Jose in January, and two festivals in March, including the Center For Literary Arts’ first annual travel writing conference, and the Tucson Festival of Books. Thanks for checking in!

 

Cheers and good wishes from Dan

 

 

2 comments

  1. S. E . Male

    Currently reading your latest book and very happy and interested. Thank you for spending the time and effort on it.
    I am finding Tennessee State Parks to feel like overnight hotels and less like camping. People simply pull in for the night and are gone in the morning. Since I grew up camping all over the Southwest in a WW 2 army surplus tent to be a part of each park and its beauty, this current treatment is disconcerting. Not sure how to see this current concept as camping. Can this brief brush with nature and trees be more than decor for some? Why are they choosing parks?
    Thank you for your kindness, Sherry in Nashville

    1. Dan White Post author

      Sherry, thank you so much for reading and for writing in. Yes, I agree with you — certain kinds of camping are starting to resemble motor lodges these days. I’ve tried that kind of camping and it gets old for me pretty quickly, mostly because I grew up with more extreme kinds of camping — backpacking on the John Muir Trail, etc. For me, the ‘glamour camping’ makes me a little bit antsy because it gets rid of all the little tasks that make the experience interesting and unpredictable for me (the process of getting the tent just right, lighting the fire, etc.) I think that kind of camping makes sense when people are feeing overwhelmed (camping with lots of little kids, for one thing) and really want to get close to nature but don’t want the hassle. I hope you are having a great trip! thanks again, Dan White, Santa Cruz CA

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