Flights taken: 19

Rental cars driven: 3

Roughly estimated number of book events: 21

Attendees at first Barnes & Noble event: 5

Attendees at second Barnes & Noble event: 125

Total pounds of butter churned at book events: about 4

Percentage of above flushed down hotel room toilets: 20

Estimated number of times Chris had to carry the butter churn to or from the car: 8

Public churning failures, attributed either to the half & half instead of cream or to improperly sealed container: 2

Pieces of storeboughten candy distributed at book events (approximately): 450

Instances in which I trekked down to WBEZ studios to remotely record content for public radio: 4

Instances in which I had to conduct a live radio interview via cell phone in a NYC cab stuck in traffic on the Willamsburg Bridge: 1

Words in The Wilder Life, not including front and back matter: 98,547

Words in The Wilder Life that are legally considered profanity, according to FCC guidelines: 3

Words in The Wilder Life legally considered profanity occuring in a quote attributed to Michael Landon: 1

Written complaints about “excessive profanity” in The Wilder Life, either by Amazon reviews or handwritten letters: 3

Highest Amazon sales rank: 104

Books ordered for relatives in fruitless attempt to bump sales rank into coveted top 100: 2

Seconds the animatronic figure of William Clark at the Museum of Western Expansion in St. Louis spends twitching: 25

YA manuscripts considered at day job: 41

Yards of bubble wrap accompanying wedding presents, estimated: 25

Minor finger injuries sustained while making brooch bouquet: 7,200

People who misheard the phrase “brooch bouquet” as “roach bouquet”: 5

People at our wedding who asked us, “Wow, who’s that guy with the kilt?” (It was Eben!): 8

Requests I have made to my husband to sing like Gordon Lightfoot: 11

Hours of delight this video, involving weird perspective and a very tiny complimentary soap in our hotel room in Minneapolis, has brought our household: MILLIONS:

I’ll stop here because I don’t think I could make a list long enough to convey what an incredible year 2011 has been.

And here’s to 2012—”this is now,” as they say, and may your now be a happy one.

1.) If you dug The Wilder Life and are on Goodreads (or would like to be on Goodreads), you have until Sunday the 20th to vote for it in the first rounds of the Goodreads Choice Awards, where it is a nominee in the Memoir/Autobiography category. I don’t think I actually win anything and I know having to choose between me and Nikki Sixx puts you in a tough spot, but I hope you’ll vote this week.

2.) My last book-related event of 2011 (out of nearly twenty!) will be a benefit for Literacy Works Chicago on Monday, December 5th, at the Hopleaf. We’re going for a Little House Christmas (for grown-ups) theme, and it’ll be much more festive than a book-signing. If you’re in Chicago, this is a great opportunity to hang out in that upstairs room at the Hopleaf for a good cause. So, come if you can! (Downloadable PDF with all the info here.)

Five things I’ve been doing since my last blog entry:

1.) Reading your young adult novel manuscript: Well, maybe not YOUR young adult novel manuscript, but there are a lot of people out there whose agents have sent me YA manuscripts, and I’m reading the hell out of them. (The rest of you ought to be working on YAnovel manuscripts this month, right?)

2.) Getting hitched. See below:

Yeah, that was fun. The September weather was perfect, and my brooch bouquet did not fall apart, though it weighed a ton (and no, I did not toss it). Every day, for nearly two months now, I consider two incontrovertible facts: First, that the wedding was wonderful and it went far beyond our expectations and second, we do not have to plan it anymore. Chris and I are SO FREAKING GLAD.

3.) Traveling for the next three weekends after the wedding and subsequently recovering from all the travel. What were we thinking? Although one of the weekends was a stay at a Lake Geneva resort, where about sixteen other weddings were taking place on the grounds around us and it happily reminded us that WE WERE DONE WITH OUR WEDDING and could sit around in comfy clothes reading novels (published ones, not manuscripts).

4.) Writing an adventure story for This American Life. Hot zig! I have always wanted to be a contributor and I got the chance to do it last month. The episode is here, and my piece is in Act Two. (My piece was inspired by children’s time-travel stories, like this insane serial in a 1960s Boys’ Life magazine.)

5.) Preparing for winter: I keep hearing that the coming season is going to be a massive snowmageddon winterpocalypse of coldastrophic proportions. There aren’t any muskrat houses in my neighborhood that I can check, but I suspect that the regular, non-musk rats around here are scurrying more and building bigger garbage nests in anticipation. At any rate, I’m getting kind of excited/paranoid and wanting to TAKE ACTION about this. I’ve replaced the tires and battery on the car (okay, which I needed to do anyway, but I feel better and even a little righteous about spending the money, knowing that the car will be in much better shape to face the coming of the SnowAntiChrist), bought a new parka, and am looking for new snow boots (recommendations, please!), and racking my brain for more things Chris and I can do or buy to give us the smug satisfaction of being ready when the time comes and the Evil Snow Empire descends. Shouldn’t we get batteries? Candles? DVDs of stylish 50s melodramas? Yes, yes, and yes.

So in April the book came out, which required me to travel all around the Midwest, sometimes with Chris, always making a churn-toting spectacle of myself. For about six weeks in April and May there were constant trips—an epic Kansas/Missouri/Iowa/Minnesota trip, a Wisconsin trip, an East Coast leg in New York and North Carolina, early evening car trips out to the bookstores in the suburbs.

Marianne in Durham made a prairie cake, while a Pudd’nhead Books patron in St. Louis made Big Woods buttons (I think there are some Farmer Boy faces in there, too). Jami had a party on her roof. I loved all of it so much.

I don’t know how, with all the travel we did in the Midwest this spring, we managed to avoid the myriad tornadoes and floods—somehow they all happened during the days we were home. This isn’t to say there wasn’t a lot of rain and weird green skies, like this one that we saw on our drive to Iowa City. And come to think of it, on the way back from Madison I did spend a pretty freaky twenty minutes stopped in traffic on the interstate while hail pelted my rental car. Still, I feel lucky.

On Easter morning we looked out our front windows and saw a chicken running around in the street. For about three days it hung out in our neighborhood, hiding in flower beds and posing for cell phone pictures. It really didn’t look like things would end well for this chicken, but our neighbors caught it in a laundry basket and found it a home with an urban chicken coop.

I can’t even begin to explain what’s going on here. This is me and Alison Arngrim and the butter churn and a martini shaker and some lyrics from “Rapper’s Delight.”  Maybe you can take it from here.

There was more travel in June, to New Mexico and then New Orleans, which I barely got to see beyond a couple of early mornings in the French Quarter. If nothing else, there were beignets and those steamy windows.

We’re not having attendants, so without bridesmaid dresses to worry about, I had no idea how to figure out My Colors. There needs to be a kind of litmus paper that can take a dab of bridal stress sweat and turn just the right shades to suit your wedding style. Based on the reception linen swatches below it would appear that we’re having a coffeecake-themed wedding, but sadly that is not the case. (Also, this Wendy McClure’s Wedding Blog is not mine, but it fascinates me, because Other Wendy McClure’s wedding is a week before ours, so it’s like a portal into my alternate reality wedding future. I wish she would update, because what is she worrying about now that I will have to worry about a week from now? Oh, wait: EVERYTHING, probably. Never mind.)

The last trip of the summer was for an event in St. Joseph, Michigan last month, and after my last churning demonstration for the time being, Chris and I wandered around in the antique stores and the crazy five-and-dime they have there. Next week I’m marrying the guy in this hat.

I can’t believe it. Thank you to everyone who helped make these past few months too incredible for words (and pictures). It’s gone by so fast! But that also means I’ll see you soon.

(Note that the mountain is not included.)

Of course, when I was a kid in Chicago I always imagined that we’d wind up here and build a shanty or something. My parents did end up moving back to New Mexico in 2006, but they bought a place with running water and electricity and a hot tub in the backyard, because they’re no fun at all.

Apparently my dad still owns the land, and it still looks exactly like this.

1979: Our very own Long Winter in Oak Park, Illinois. I’m pretty sure the Blizzard of ’79 coincided with my Little House reading years. The snow in Chicago was so heavy that garage roofs began to collapse around the city.  One night my dad had to go out on the roof of the front porch and shovel off those snowdrifts—a feat that seemed at least as thrillingly treacherous as Cap and Almanzo’s seed wheat rescue.

I remember being disappointed that I couldn’t look out my bedroom window and see the snow at eye level the way Laura could.

1980 (?): You may have already read about how I was in a community theater production of A Christmas Carol and got to wear a bonnet. And a long dress. And a crocheted shawl.

This was pretty much the high point of my life, I think.

1981 (?): Here I am at my own version of Plum Creek, at a campground west of Chicago that we’d visit two or three times a year, mostly on holiday weekends. I fished (badly), waded, caught crayfish (or at least watched people catch them), and tragically lost swim toys to the current. If I could have done all of it while wearing a calico dress, I would have.

I also tried my damnedest to grow my hair long enough to braid.  You might have been able to wrench a couple of pathetic pigtails out of that mess, but just barely. That’s the longest I’ve ever been able to grow it.

2009: But who needs good hair when you have a BONNET? I bought at this one the Little House on the Prairie Museum in Kansas and preened in the mirror of my motel room in Springfield, Missouri. The first of many bonnets I would buy, and many, many more dorky photos.

Speaking of pictures, I’m in the process of putting up more photos of my Little House trips and shenanigans on The Wilder Life’s Flickr page as well as the Facebook page, so stay tuned.

Also! Book review blogger extraordinaire The Girl from the Ghetto has posted a truly EPIC review and giveaway of The Wilder Life today, so if you want another chance to win a copy of the book before it officially launches a week from Thursday, GO ENTER.

Anyway, earlier this month I went to Weetacon and took part in what can only be called a FASHION EXTRAVAGANZA sponsored by Igigi, because what else can you call it when you and a dozen of your friends agree to pick a dress to review, only to find out that you actually got three dresses? I already own a few things by Igigi (whose name sounds like a sultry art house film), so I was happy that I got to try these.

My first choice was the Isobel Dress in Garnet. My experience with wrap dresses is that true wrap styles look the best but are complicated to put on, like fashion origami. Isobel is a mock wrap style—a pullover dress with a front panel that ties at the side. So while I like that it’s simple, the fit felt a little slouchier than the other two dresses And like a lot of wrap and especially Igigi dresses, it’s low cut enough to be conspicuously va-voomish unless you wear a camisole under it (see more demure look at left). Otherwise it’s definitely not an office look, at least not unless you work for a Bond villain or Sir Mix-a-Lot. For a dressed-up look it’s extremely comfortable, and I’ll probably wear this to one of the book events. If I’d found this dress while shopping I think I would have been sold on the color more than the fit.

The other two dresses I picked out were the Tres Chic dresses: one in Plum, and one in the original black-and-white pattern. For the purpose of the review I’d decided to take  a gamble with these: I wasn’t sure about the front-gathered look or the kind of Abstract Expressionist-meets 80s-crazy pattern. But they turned out to be my favorites—especially the black-and-white one, which has a little bit of a retro thing going. It makes me look exactly like the grown-up I wanted to be in 1981, which I believe was some fabulous art gallery owner kind of person.

What I dig most about these two dresses is that they flatter like a wrap dress without the camisole issue. You’d think that it wouldn’t be a big deal to just add a camisole, but in my current organizationally-challenged non-fabulous-art-gallery-owner life, it’s one more thing I have to find in my closet. Too many times I’ve forgone wearing a dress or top because I couldn’t find something to wear under it. So I appreciate that the Tres Chic dresses work all by themselves, and I have a feeling that between important work stuff and the book events I’m going to wear the hell out of these.

Remember what I said about the comments? I mention it because Igigi is letting me do a $50 gift card giveaway in this comments. Just go to the Igigi site, find something you love, and then come back here and post the name of the item and a lovely pithy description of how and where you would wear it (KEEP IT CLEAN, FOLKS). Do it by April 7, 2011 and winners will be picked at random. FURTHERMORE you can visit the Igigi reviews of all my fellow Weetacon ladies and post in their comments as well for more chances to win.

(And if this random-giveaway-in-the-comments business works out, I might use it in the near future for a certain book. Just saying.)

Photos at right by Jorie Tappa. Photos at left taken in the mirror with my phone.

The site’s new finery is the handiwork of Jennette, who has been promoting her own new book Chocolate & Vicodin this winter (PLEASE view the exceedingly-cute-despite-the-depressing-subject book trailer on that page, by the way), and who knows how jittery the book pre-launch experience can be. I’m not twitching that much right now, but of course there’s 18 more days left to freak out.

A few of you have asked if it makes a difference where or how you buy the book. I’ll just say that any new purchase or pre-order of the hardcover or ebook will directly support The Wilder Life, and whether you choose an indie bookseller, a chain store, or an online merchant is up to you. As long as you don’t buy an advanced reader copy on eBay (which is sort of illegal) or shoplift (definitely illegal), you will be doing fine by me (and avoiding jail & stuff).  That said, I have heard that early sales and pre-orders are important, so if you can buy early and buy often (Sorry, I know, I’m from Chicago), it will definitely help.

Other things you can do to support The Wilder Life right now…

• Join the book’s Facebook page: Occasionally there’s book news there, but more often I’ve been posting photos and links to all kinds of Laura Ingalls Wilder geekery, and you’re welcome—nay, encouraged!—to post and share as well. I believe my publisher wants me to mobilize some kind of bonnethead army or something? I’m also hoping to get some giveaway action going there in the next few weeks (hint: might involve photos!), so be there.
• Follow @HalfPintIngalls on Twitter, and not just because I told Riverhead that she would have 10,000 followers by publication time, which probably won’t happen unless there’s some kind of online Dakota Boom. I know Ma would say that what’s really important is not the number of  followers, but engagement with key influencers and tweet amplification how much you love what you’re doing.  It’s true that all the long months that I spent writing the book would have been harder and lonelier if I hadn’t gotten to go online every day and exchange Twittergraph messages with funny and ardent Little House fans. And HalfPint plans to keep things going as long as the seed wheat holds out.
  
• Plan to come to an event: I have an events page up here on this site and also on Facebook, which is mighty handy with the RSVPs and reminders and sharing. The events are technically “readings” but there may also be “churning” and whatever else I can come up with to rock your patent desks.
• Get the word out: Thanks so much to those of you who’ve posted wonderful reviews from advance reader copies so far (I’m trying to keep track of the blog reviews, but feel free to post a link in the comments if you have one that I’ve missed).  If you’ve been lucky enough to get or win an ARC but don’t have a blog, you can review it on Goodreads, or mention it on the Twittergraph, or else write your review on a slate and pass it around the classroom, just like the Lazy, Lousy Lizzie Jane poem—and you’ll remember how that totally went viral in De Smet.

Okay, that’s all I can think right now of that doesn’t involve putting on a calico dress and accosting strangers on public transportation. THANK YOU.

A much more detailed event page is forthcoming on this site, but for now, here’s a quick list of all the confirmed The Wilder Life events for this spring:

April 14: CHICAGO: Barnes & Noble (Webster Place), 7:00 PM

April 16: KANSAS CITY: Johnson County Central Resource Library in Overland Park (with Rainy Day Books), 2:00 PM

April 18: ST. LOUIS: City Library, Schlafly Branch (with Pudd’nhead Books), 7:00 PM

April 19: IOWA CITY: Prairie Lights, 7:00 PM

April 20: MINNEAPOLIS: Magers & Quinn, 7:30 PM

April 21: CHICAGO: Book Cellar, 7:00 PM

April 29: CHICAGO/WINNETKA: The Bookstall, 6:30 PM

May 3: CHICAGO/NAPERVILLE: Anderson’s Bookshop, 7:00 PM

May 10: MADISON: Barnes & Noble (West Towne), 7:00 PM

May 17: BROOKLYN: Word, 7:30 PM

May 18: DURHAM: The Regulator Bookshop, 7:00 PM

June 11: ALBUQUERQUE: Bookworks, 3:00 PM

In addition to the event page on this site I’ll also have all these events posted on The Wilder Life’s Facebook page, where you can spread the word or RSVP for reminders.

There’s one part that’s really hard about announcing book event stuff, which is that for every place I’m headed, there are dozens of others that I can’t visit. I’m lucky that Riverhead could give me a few days of semi-glamorous Midwestern jet-setting in addition to the couple of trips that I’m making on my own dime, but it’s still just eight cities I’m visiting, which makes it awfully statistically likely that I’ll miss yours.

So when you say, “Come to Otisburg!” or “Can you please stop in Chocolate City?” my heart wrenches like a twisted towel, because of all the above events have been in the works for months and it’s usually not possible to spontaneously add Otisburg or Chocolate City or Bedford Falls or even Port Charles to the list, though I will definitely keep them in mind for next year when the paperback comes out. It is a sad fact that I am not a one-woman jam band and cannot tour the country for months and months, improvising long, noodling solos every night on my butter churn guitar.  That said, I hope that those of you who are in these cities will come out for a lovely night (or afternoon) of reading, book discussion, trivia (maybe!) and other Little House shenanigans yet to be determined.

(Photo courtesy of Travelpod.com)

The Wilder Life is coming out as a hardcover book. I was fine with I’m Not the New Me being a trade paperback, but the idea of hardcover thrills me—the smooth jacket, the photo on the back flap, the board binding and stamped spine underneath. I love how you can take off the jacket of any hardcover book, even the Snooki book, and suddenly it looks important and serious, like a Franklin Library Classic.

I keep thinking it’s sort of a weird time to be published in hardcover. I wonder these days, with the book business the way it is, and bookstores closing down, and ebooks as this bright new flickering thing.  It’s a fun time to be working in children’s books—at work our picture books are starting to show up on tablets and we’re starting to think in terms of apps. (I wish there was a better shorthand name for a digitally enhanced picture book than “app,” as long as it’s not something inane like “blingybook” or “schmoopystory” or whatever.)

But when it comes to hardcover books in general, I wonder whether they’re destined to become more precious objects, or just clunkier ones. I wonder what it’ll all be like the next time I have a book out.

I’m definitely not one of those people who thinks ebooks are the end of the world, but I don’t quite know what they’re the beginning of, either, or even if they’re the beginning of anything different. I have an e-reader now (I don’t want to say what kind, but it has a k in its name). It’s great—nice and light and I use it mostly for reading manuscripts, and it’s already pretty life-changing in that respect. I have a few books on there, but I haven’t gotten around to reading them yet, and probably won’t until I do some traveling this spring. I suspect when I do finally start reading this way I am going to love the hell out of not having to stuff books in my carry-on and that there are certain books that I’m going to buy and read this way. But I also know that I’ll still be buying a lot of new books in hardcover for the time being. I’ll keep buying my friends’ books in old-style booky form, and books from people whose readings I go to, and books from bookstores that I want to support so that they don’t go out of business and get turned into Jimmy John’s franchises. I know most people don’t have all of those same reasons I have, but I like to think that when it comes to book formats we’re going to stay omnivorous and consume different books in different ways.

One side effect of having a book published, I’ve found, is that people tend to tell you how they bought or didn’t buy your book, whether or not you want to hear the truth. They’ll tell you that they loved reading the copy that fifteen of their friends are passing around, or that they bought it for ten cents at a library sale, or that they read it at the bookstore because they “just don’t buy books.” And yes, some of these truths make me wince a little, but it’s also true that those people found me and read me and thought enough about what they read to email me about it, or to post something on a place like Goodreads. I will try to remember that next time I hear that someone is reading a pirated PDF of my book on their internet-enabled digital watch or something (but please don’t read a pirated PDF of my book on your internet-enabled digital watch).

I don’t know what the takeaway of all this is: a book in the hand is worth something, even it’s not the kind of book that you can hold in your hand? That sounds right.  Hearing that someone has my book on a Nook or a Kindle or a Kobo or an iPad or a Samsung tablet thingamabob or as an mp3 audio download will be humbling and wonderful, and I hope when the time comes you’ll let me know how you’re reading The Wilder Life.

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Speaking of Goodreads, there’s still time to sign up for a chance to win a free galley. (Just don’t pirate it and stick it on your watch.)

Laura Ingalls Wilder is 144 years old today.  Her husband, Almanzo Wilder, turns 154 on Saturday, so I’m putting up a picture that includes him, too.

This is one of my very favorite Wilder photos. Laura and Manly are only around 65 and 75 here, and they are standing with their dog, Nero, in front of the little modern cottage where they lived for several years in Mansfield, Missouri. Laura was working on the first Little House books by this point. She sent this photo to a fan, and explained that even though she and Almanzo are both looking down and appear sort of ashamed, they were really just trying to make sure the dog sat still.

I love her whole look here—her dress, her bob, her shoes. And oh God, I love that dog. They brought him along on a car trip from Mansfield to South Dakota (a 2500 mile drive!) in the spring of 1931, and Laura bought him ice cream. (“He loved it,” she said in her travel diary.)

For a long time I couldn’t quite tell Laura Ingalls Wilder apart from her fictional counterpart. While I’ve always loved the Laura of the books, I’ve been less sure about Bessie. (She went by that name throughout most of her adult life.) But this photo is one of the things that helped me know her better.

Happy Birthday to Laura and Bessie and Mama Bess, to Half-Pint and Flutterbudget and Mrs. Wilder.  Thank you for everything.

Me during the Blizzard of '79. I still miss that blue plush coat.

*I have this idea that for the rest of the winter I could name blog entries after chapter titles in The Long Winter. Need to find some reason to have a blog post called “ANTELOPE!”

Coming home early on Tuesday afternoon and watching the blizzard begin was an exquisitely giddy experience. I just sat by the big window by my desk and watched the snow come in careening gusts of wind.

No, I didn’t try to make this snowstorm one of my Little House reenactment projects, though I did have lots of Long Winter thoughts, and they swirled around in my head with all my modern neuroses. Like I was thinking that if the power went out I could use my quaint, adorable oil lamp, and then I remembered that my laptop’s battery function was broken, which of course freaked me out because THEN I’d have to make a tiny little generator with the old-fashioned coffee grinder and spend every morning hand-cranking a meager little serving of wireless while Chris twisted Chicago mayoral campaign junk mail into bundles of fuel.

But that didn’t happen. Our power stayed on, though the wind blew so hard I could feel our building shake, and there was lightning and thunder (which in a snowstorm looks and sounds really insane, like the earth is going to break open and fling up Superman’s Fortress of Solitude or something), and we were fine. Our car was stuck in the garage for three days until Chris was finally able to shovel out a narrow passage allowing the car to just barely squeeze through the waist-high snowbanks; the first time we pulled out the snow squeaked, like giant styrofoam wedges.  And if I were to describe the blizzard experience overall, I would say it was almost fun, thanks to this improbably comfy world we live in, with all this home insulation and central heat and horseless-carriage-plows.

And “almost fun” except for the free-floating sensation that’s been lingering these few days after the storm, when everything seems to stand still and sometimes it’s all I can do to complete the simplest tasks, even when the weather has kept me at home and opened up new vistas of spare time. But I guess it’s no coincidence that Laura feels “stupid” so many times during The Long Winter. (And I love that Google Books lets me look that up.) I have so much to do in the next few months between work and the book coming out, but maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself when I find myself wanting to just sit around and stare at the stove fire (or, really, Season 3 of Jersey Shore).

Hope you all are doing okay with your own Long Winters.

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Wedding Planning Question Corner (which will perhaps be an occasionally recurring feature this year): What do you have to do to get to talk to a caterer? We’re still looking for one and I seem to be sending a lot of emails and voicemails into the void lately.

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Book release stuff: my event schedule is being finalized right now, so if you’re in or near Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Iowa City, or Kansas City, I’ll have news for you soon…