Book Tour Day 6

Landed in Austin at 11am with plenty of rest after staying at the lake in Gallatin, TN. I met my next media escort Olivia at baggage and we were off. Nothing was scheduled until 6:30 that night so I had basically 7 1/2 hours to kill. Olivia, an insane driver, drove me from bookstore to bookstore to sign books, but we spent most of the free time shopping. Austin has great shops and we hit 2 big western wear stores for fun. I picked up a few duds for the kids and bought myself a Wrangler snap-front cowboy shirt. We had lunch at my favorite Shady Grove in Austin for green chile cheese fries and stopped by Hut's Hamburgers to say hello. They had used none of the promotional stuff the publisher sent and didn't really care that I was there.

The scheduled interview at 6:30 was cancelled so my only commitment at that point in Austin

was to read at a Borders waaaaay out of town. The store was in a monstrous mall north of the city and was about 3 days old. Wires were crossed and my 'reading' turned into a 'signing' which was very bizarre. On a scale of 1 to 10 on the weirdness scale, this was about an eleven. They set me up at a table by the front door and told me to 'see if anyone wanted a book'. The whole ordeal was made weirder by the fact that there were no customers. I sat for an hour and maybe 10 people walked into the new store. Most wouldn't even acknowledge that I was sitting there and those that did thought that I was security and that I wanted to inspect their bags. My escort attempted to draw people in by pretending to want a book signed but the ruse never worked. ONE customer asked for a signed book. I read a passage from the book aloud to my escort and left shortly thereafter. Austin was a bust.

Cheese tots at Dirty's and a burger at Casino El Camino were in order so we finished the day eating. I had a local beer fave Shiner Bock and left for the hotel to get some sleep. The plan was to get up at the insane hour of 3:30am to catch a flight to Houston. This should be fun.