Christmas Eve, and it’s time to wind down. It will be a very long time before I can fully appreciate and express my thanks for all the many generous things people did to help get Tinsel out there, but I am forever grateful to you all, and I hope to get around to thanking many people individually.

I’m tired. I’m happy about the book, and a little sad, too. Over the last several weeks I have met or heard from so many people, and listened to so many of their stories about the package of joy and confusion that is American Christmas. It’s been a real pleasure to have that conversation — with readers, with reporters and hosts in the media, and from your comments here and on Facebook, and with feedback from good and bad reviews, including the 49 and counting on Amazon. I’ve read, and will re-read, each and every one with a willingness to learn as a writer. (And also to pluck blurbs for the paperback edition!)

There is something I wanted this book to be, something specific, which I’ll deal with in my very next posting (above).

Meanwhile, I have a few more links to share, if you can stand it…

• I met Terry Mattingly, a writer whose weekly column on religion is a mainstay in several hundred newspapers, at Union Station on Monday for lunch, and we wound up talking for two hours — and I could’ve gone longer, but I had to scoot over to NPR. He put his finger on things about Tinsel that I knew intuitively but not academically or theologically. He wonders if the book might fit the definition of “humanistic existentialism.” He also came up with a perfect thesis statement for the book, based on a section title and quote from one of the characters. Without endorsing the sentiment, Terry said Tinsel’s main message goes something like this, more or less: Fake is okay here. Fake is all we’ve got in this culture. Deal with it.

Terry’s column about Tinsel is here.

• Meredith Simons at Slate would give a hearty AMEN to Terry’s thesis statement, especially the “deal with it” part, which Meredith thinks I don’t deal with so well. I respectfully disagree, but this is just the kind of intelligent take on the book that I prefer to engage with.

• If you get The Week (not since the heyday of Reader’s Digest have downstairs toilets been so well-served, and I mean that as a sincere compliment), the current issue’s “Last Word” pages in the back of the magazine feature a very tightly-edited 2,000-word excerpt from Tinsel. I can’t find it on their web site (maybe they don’t have e-rights), so check the downstairs bathroom.

• I did NPR’s Talk of the Nation show on Monday afternoon — great questions and callers. Have a listen.

• Thanks to more than a few of you, I got some great questions at The Washington Post’s live online chat on Tuesday morning.

• The New York Times’ Thursday Styles section has an article today by Hilary Stout about people who “opt out” of Christmas once in a while. I’m interviewed midway through.

• Carol Kaufmann from AARP Bulletin’s web site and I had a nice, long interview while I was driving from the outer Houston suburbs back to Dallas one month ago (seems like much longer!). She’s very nice and asks really smart questions, but what impresses me is how deftly she condenses this blabbermouth.

That’s it, I think, except for a lot of chatter about the book that showed up on other people’s blogs this week, which I wish I had time to link back to, or the power to resist the lure of the Google RSS alert. Thing is, I’ve got laundry and TV reviews to do. Christmas isn’t at my throat this year, but everything else is — and then, Friday morning, vacation at last.

Time for presents! Pace yourselves!

The TV listings don’t lie! Barring some misfortune, I’ll be a guest on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson next week – Thursdsay, Dec. 17 – so set the DVR or stay up and watch! It’s on CBS, after Letterman.

I like the show a lot and not just because they’re having me on. I wrote a Style section profile of Ferguson in March 2005, when the show was just getting going, but this seems to not factor into their decision to have me on, since nobody there remembers it. (I suppose I could tell you the reason why I think I’m on, and it’s completely legit, but for now can we just bask in the delusion that people everywhere care a lot about my book? Yes?)

Want some more excitement? The other guest that night is none other than Sigourney Weaver. Man, if the opportunity presents itself, do I ever have things to thank her for, namely her timeless portrayal of one Lt. Ellen Ripley. I’ve watched Aliens more times than I can count. (That one’s my favorite, though I love Alien too, and I ache for the potential seen in Alien3.) You can keep your Tony Robbins, your Paolo Coehlo, your Joel Osteen – Ripley is my life coach, my spiritual center, my rock and my salvation. She’s my framed Successories poster of the mind.

“If just one of those things manages to get down here, then all this, this bullshit that you think is so important? Well, you can just kiss all that goodbye!!”

Bliss. I love those movies because she’s so damn right. She’s scared shitless but she goes forward. Want to get out of here alive? Then Do What Ripley Says.

Reached a Yuletide peace in Seattle. The book is out there and doing whatever it’ll do. The flights have all been on time. The hotels have offered solitude and quiet and high threadcounts. The morning TV anchors at Seattle’s Q13 were perky and interested for exactly four minutes, which in their world is lavish attention. The public radio station hosts are always so deft with their questions. The December sky is beautiful; the temps dropped below 30. I queued up my Czars playlist on the drive down to Seattle from Bellingham on Sunday afternoon. Discovered that Seattle does a nice Christmas vibe, with lots of street bustle, lights, pedestrian-shopping. The very thing exurbanites crave this time of year, so long as it doesn’t get too … edgy. Anyhow, enjoy some Czars, and keep reading:

My friend Dan Savage – the syndicated and world-renowned sex-advice columnist, book author, and Xacto-sharp cultural pundit – had me over to dinner (lovely salmon, buttered carrots, delish cookie bars with ice cream) at his house Sunday night, with Terry and The Kid. They’d just put up their tall, aromatic Christmas tree, which Dan trimmed into perfect symmetry, and which Terry very intricately swathed in a multitude of clear mini lights; furthermore Terry insists the tree be adorned with only top-quality glass ornaments. Tammie Parnell would give him a grade of “absolutely phenomenal.” (I showed up with junky ornaments from Bellingham’s Xmas store — absolutely unphenomenal.) It’s interesting to watch what I call “PhD-level homosexuals” in their natural habitat of householdedness: longtime partnered, with an actual child that they raise, living in well-appointed, still-in-progress property refurbishment; add a tiny deaf dog with one eye and chenille-soft fur, and give the whole scene clarity and a sense of absurd purpose. And yet they are still utterly hip and plugged into the world at large. The Kid is a tween now and uses a steely glare to leaven the household snark, such as when both Dads excitedly explain their idea for a rather gay iPhone app; The Kid also hates it when the grownup talk goes down to a whisper. Boy oh boy, do I ever hope he writes a memoir someday! Don’t you?

From his Grand Poobah day job at The Stranger, Dan wrote a nice blog item about me on Monday, trying to get people to come to my reading. He referred back to some of the essays I’d dashed off for The Stranger’s annual, counter-programmed gay pride issues in the last decade or so. I’d forgotten how much fun I had writing those.

Alas, the low temperatures combined with a Monday night ennui combined with my chronic failure to become famous and beloved all o’er the land meant Monday night’s reading remained low-key, but pleasant:

About 15-20 people were there, and they turned out to be a perfect audience. I’ve reached a zazen point with these things. I’m thrilled when anybody shows up and I make it work and I don’t fret about it one bit — no, really I don’t. At this reading, I tried doing the Cookie the Elf scene from Chapter 12, and might do it again in St. Louis, if the situation calls for it. There were lots of good questions afterward.

The fate of the Elliott Bay Book Company is in flux, or so I’ve read, and I wish them well. Frankly, Mr. Shankly, it wouldn’t hurt the store to get out of that neighborhood – historical though it may be, among pretty 19th-century buildings, old-fashioned streets and all. That neighborhood gets slummier and crackier (heroin-ier?) every time I visit Seattle. And that basement off the café, where Elliott Bay stages their readings, a sacred literary space that they are so proud of? Yeah, not so much for me. The upstairs is so much nicer. The bookstore in Bellingham does the same thing – welcome to tonight’s author reading/signing … in the dreary basement! And Powell’s puts you up on the top floor, awash in fluorescence and gray concrete and safely away from, you know, the customers.

So far, I give ambience awards to the brand new Legacy Books, the indie store in Plano; with a close runner-up being Full Circle Books in OKC.

**UPDATE, 12/9: Breaking news: Elliott Bay is moving to Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Kim Voynar, a film writer whom I knew in 5^th grade and 9^th grade (it’s complicated; she transferred schools a lot), came to the reading and we went out to dinner. Twenty-five years is just about the maximum amount of time that can pass before a person simply has too much tell you to bring you up to speed; it’s on the precipice of being strangers. So in a way, Kim, it’s nice to finally meet you! She’s having some pretty scary surgery on Wednesday; I’ll be thinking of her.

I think we’re pretty much caught up on Tinsel press, and arn’cha relieved? Hold on, hold on:

• There’s an excerpt in Wednesday’s Washington Post – nice front display from my Style peeps: Thanks, Lynn Medford — and HJ and Cavna and Padget.

• And there was a delightful 20 minutes spent on New Hampshire public radio’s “Word of Mouth” on Monday afternoon, if you want to have a lis’sen.

* * *

MEANWHILE, THERE’S a whole world going on out there that has nothing to do with me. Imagine.

I have been so bad about keeping up with my news diet, but did anyone read this riveting, cannot-put-it-down dreck in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday? Who’d wanna be married to either of the people in this story? Show of hands.

I have seen this marriage – not this specific one, but I’ve seen its many analogues. Two self-reflective quasi-hipsters meet and marry. The husband comes standard-bundled with some all-consuming passion that must be treated as lifestyle, not mere hobby, and preoccupy the entire household. (In this article it’s gourmet cooking, but it could be anything: building a “sanctuary” shed out back, from scratch with reclaimed wood. Carpentry. Rebuilding vintage autmobiles. Growing all your own food. Brewing your own beer. Playing lead guitar in a band. Starting a record label. And the worst: getting a book contract.) The wife plays along until the baby (babies) are born and then she goes understandably batshit on his stunted ass. The grandbaby-obsessed in-laws (her parents, usually) encroach. The blog posts and freelance articles become increasingly personal. Suddenly all this crap ain’t so funny anymore and before you know you it, you are building an entire NYT Magazine cover story around the clever idea of getting your husband to go into all sorts of marital therapy with you. Oh, those straight-n-married white people problems: the NYT will never tire of them, will they? Let’s hope not. Two dollars a word! (Right? More? Less? How would I know.)

Gays, besides the $2-a-word-to-write-about-our-emotional-travails (which the NYT doesn’t buy so much), are we sure this is what we want? Or should we be paying more attention to George Michael, who said this week that he smokes seven joints a day and that he gets casual, outside-of-his-relationship sex twice a week?

Freedom!

Inara Verzemnieks

Portland: Recuperative in an odd way. But sort of downbeat, too. I guess that’s what that place is all about. At the Powell’s reading Friday night, I drew about 25-30 people, and for some reason I decided to come across like a full-on Snarky Claus. About five minutes in, one woman got up and left. I picked parts of the book that were gloomier (why?) and my “funny parts” landed with a thud. Something in the delivery — and the crowd. Never fear, though, for I always have friends: across the very back row were some grinning, lifelong fans, including Randy Cox, Mike and Fran Arrieta-Walden and the great Inara Verzemnieks. The Q&A perked up. My readings are always enhanced if there’s a couple of kooks in the crowd, especially if they’re of the Bill McKibben-type and/or peak oil paranoia variety. I can go right along with them until I have to steer them back onto the subject at hand: Christmas, hearts, family, retail, American identity. It seemed to work. One self-confessed atheist and Christmas crank (”I celebrate solstice!”) bought SIX copies for her family, and seemed wickedly delighted to give them the book — their first Christmas presents from her in years. I told her to let me know how that goes over.

After that, dinner at a restaurant a block away from Powell’s called Clyde Common, with Inara and — at last! — Nancy Rommelmann, one of Janet Duckworth’s favorite journalists, which makes her someone I would totally want to meet. Great chatting, good wine. I’ve long thought Inara was a true beacon of great writing in newspapers, since I first met her when she was the Albuquerque Tribune’s summer intern; the Pulitzer jury darn near agreed with me in 2007, and should have given her the prize. Well, now guess what? Still in her tender thirtysomething-ness, Inara is saying farewell to the Oregonian next Friday (a buyout!) and going after her MFA. She already has a little bit of The Glow. (Mike Arrieta-Walden, who’s left newspapering to teach high school, has The Glow too, the I-don’t-work-in-a-newsroom-anymore Glow.) Inara has been enormously complimentary about Tinsel and sent me an e-mail Saturday morning that has pushed me to go on. Thank you Inara, and know that I will always pay very close attention to whatever you’re writing.

And, as I knew I would, I totally dug Nancy. Someday (in heaven? On some space colony?), Janet Duckworth will be editing features written by Nancy Rommelmann, Inara Verzemnieks, and me.

Bellingham: Cold wind blowing in off the bay. Twinkly Christmas lights in downtown historic Fairhaven, but not a lot of shoppers braving the bluster for my Saturday-night reading at Village Books. It’s a wonderful store full of great books and staff recommendations, the perfect indie ambience, and almost no audience until 7:04, when, miraculously, seven people showed up, separately. I’ll take that. I sat down among them and we just chatted for an hour about the holidays, America, the future, the economy, the past, our families, my book, Black Friday, the history of Christmas, and the fraught psychology of giving and getting presents. I like it when this happens.

Total books sold here: Zero. I signed a bunch of stock and did get the clerk to recategorize my book in their inventory (they had it under “Christmas books” and “biography”), so that when the holidays are over, and Mssrs. Burroughs, Sedaris, Huckabee, Beck, Keillor, et al have their holiday books boxed up and put away, Tinsel will go live in the “American Culture” section, which is near the front of the store and seems to have a dazzling array of nonfiction.

Author then takes himself across the street, to Dirty Dan Harris’s Steakhouse for two glasses of wine (more perfect Oregon reds) and a seared filet tips with asparagus. Mood: Lonely, but weirdly blissful. Stops at the Barnes & Noble to sign “stock” (which consisted of um, one book, so he passed), and then buys a peanut-butter cookie and adjourns to the La Quinta where he sleeps ever so deeply, serenaded by a magical December howling and rustling outside, what Nell would call a “tay-yay inna win.”

So long, Bellingham. (And yes, Elaine, the Shangri-La motel is still there! Did not stop to see if there’s been any updating in amenities since 1995.)

I have some more Tinsel press and reviews to share today:

• Book Reporter has weighed in affirmatively, with a lot of (strange, but appropriate!) referral to Joel Garreau’s indispensible Edge City. I’ve checked in with Joel and neither of us know this critic personally, but we are happy to be linked together in theme and spirit. (Or at least I am.)

• AOL’s Holidash blog did a little story about the book. Who knew AOL has a whole site devoted to Christmas?

• Tan Vinh at the Seattle Times has written this review, which seems to like the subject okay but feels Tinsel is trying to be two books instead of one (a bargain at any price!) and calls it “uneven.” Sigh. (Also uneven: Vinh’s spelling of Stuever/Steuver. Gets it right, then wrong, then right again, then wrong.)

• And Anne Rodgers, who just left the Palm Beach Post, and is also now probably bathed in The Glow, didn’t get out the door before filing this review.

So, another long week of book promo ahead: TV and radio tomorrow (Monday) morning and then a reading at Elliott Bay Books in downtown Seattle. Starts at 7 p.m. if you know people in Seattle. For those of you sending e-mails of the hang-in-there variety, do not worry about me or my book sales: This trip has been worth the breakfasts alone. This morning, at Diamond Jim’s diner in Bellingham, I almost went into a gravy coma. My book is doing one last thing to me: making me quite fat! (And, yes, perhaps, happy.)

How’s the book doing? Meh, is my overall hunch. I felt a bit down about that for a while yesterday.

Landed in Seattle right after sunset, rented a car (sporty little Pontiac G5) and drove down to Portland in heavy traffic on I-5, with fog and some rain and a sense of vintage Pacific Northwest foreboding, getting here around 10 p.m. Checked into the hotel and was immediately lured into the cozy restaurant. Two glasses of wine and my whole perspective changed. This is fun. This is what I wanted to do. My life is fine and my book’s not bad either.

On the drive, when the Olympia NPR station began playing the Terry Gross show about Afghanistan that I’d already heard twice in two different time zones that day, I realized I had something else to listen to: Tinsel!

The audiobook version, as read by Ray Porter. He’s a Shakespearean-trained actor (according to his bio) with a nice deep voice. It’s a little surreal to listen to the book read in the voice of God (a gentle, folksy God) but I have to say I was charmed within just a few pages. He does wide range of people and tones, and he seems to get the book. He even does a pretty good Tammie. Of course, as he’s reading along I keep thinking, wow — I wish they could make an audiobook of a draft of the manuscript, so that the writer can come behind it and change a few things. And cut! Dialogue really is the magic thing, whether on the page or in the ear. I keep hearing parts of the narration/prose that I would trim, just a little. Sigh.

Off soon to Powell’s (aka CITY OF BOOKS) for tonight’s reading, and then, when it’s over, I’m off to what I’m sure will be a great dinner out with the megatalented Inara Verzemnieks. Portland is cool and it knows it, though I know in my heart of hearts I’m not nearly Gore-Texy and/or tatooey enough to live here.

Let’s play catch up to some of my recent hype, shall we? Look, I also wish this blog didn’t always resemble some proud mom’s refrigerator door, but I’m trying to enter the Tinsel media ops into the permanent record, before I forget to clip-and-save.

• Rick Rogers from the Oklahoman did not only a video, but a story, too. I had a great time visiting the newsroom and meeting Joe Hight, Jenni Carlson and some of the paper’s staff in an informal Q&A session. (And I got an Oklahoman duffel bag, a set of coasters, OPUBCO ball cap, and a T-shirt: boo-tay.)

• There was this great review in the Cleveland Plain Dealer last weekend that I missed. And on Thursday, Tinsel was one of the “12 Books of Christmas” in USA Today (”This isn’t a Norman Rockwell view of Christmas. It’s both laugh-out-loud funny and oddly depressing. Stuever’s keen eye misses very little”), and Paul Constant had some nice things to say in The Stranger.

• Wendy Shortman at the Vanguard (Portland State U.’s newspaper) did this nice little story. Not only did Wendy keep me company for a few minutes by phone when I drove from Dallas to OKC on Monday, but she managed to get everything right, especially the names: Stuever, Tammie, Cavazos, Caroll, Trykoski, Bridgette. This seems like no big deal, right? Well, some people in the business longer than her haven’t managed to get all of them correct. Someone hire her.

• Radio, radio: I’ve lost track of what sort of radio I’ve done, but I will say that the hour I spent with Celeste Quinn on “The Afternoon Magazine” on WILL, the public radio station in Urbana, Ill., seemed to go really well. I haven’t gone back to listen to it, but I thought she and her audience had the best questions so far. It was my pleasure to appear on her show. And this morning I got up super early to go to the studios of KPOJ-AM, the progressive talk station in Portland. Right before I went onto the “Carl + Christine” morning show (no Carl today, we had Tom) they were bitchin’ about the wealth gap in America. Completely uncaffeinated and all riled up, I slid right in to a chair in their sound booth and became this lefty, liberal chatterbox. By the time my 15 minutes were up, I’d pretty much portrayed Christmas as Everything That’s Wrong with Capitalistic America. Hey, you have to work your audience. Glenn Beck, if you’d like to see another side of me and talk about, oh, I dunno, your Christmas book and the reason for the season, well, brother, I stand ready.

Look at the time! I need to: change clothes, figure out what to read at Powell’s tonight, and, most important to a fun and tolerable booksigning event, have another glass of Oregon wine. More later.

If you know people in Bellingham, Wash., well wontcha pretty please ask them to come to my reading at Village Books, Saturday night at 7? Do they have anything better to do? Prove it.

Is it a book tour or just a long nostalgia trip? And is it my own nostalgia, or some longer epic nostalgia trip that anticipates the demise of the printed word? Yikes! In any case, strap in…

About once a week I have a vivid dream that takes place in Oklahoma City, where I was born and spent the first 18 years of my life. Sometimes it involves one of the malls (Quail Springs, or Penn Square before it had a roof, or Shepherd Mall before it emptied out). Sometimes it involves downtown, or the Murrah building. Once in a while, the fully or partially-lit neon Charcoal Oven drive-in sign goes whizzing by, usually during a chase scene. A lot of times the dream involves McGuinness High School. (Diploma revoked! Back to class, Stuever!) Many times I’ve dreamt about Lake Hefner and floods. (Floods are supposed to be significant dream symbols, but I think it means nothing more than the bladder telling the dreaming mind to get up and go pee.)

Almost always in these dreams, the sun has just set and I can see, on the eastern horizon, the row of televsion and radio transmitter towers with their red lights blinking on and off. To me, the towers at night are the most poetic image of my Oklahoma, but maybe they’re something people here don’t think twice about, since they’re always there. I think the towers look like a piece of sublime installation art. Naturally, I can’t find a single image of them online to show you. (Michael Wichita — get out here.) They make a cameo (and copyrighted) appearance here, in a storm-chaser/lightning-fetish web site of some sort. If you have any pictures of the radio/TV towers of OKC at night, send em my way. They are for me like Gatsby’s green light across the lake.

So, another image instead: what if I crib someone’s Flickr photo of the OKC skyline at Christmastime? Not the same effect as the radio towers, but home all the same …

Maybe once a year, for one reason or another (class reunion, funeral) I actually GO to Oklahoma City. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been gone longer (23 years) than I lived here, because the place is still very much with me. I got here Monday night — drove up I-35 from D/FW airport, and saw the skyline customarily aglow with keep-the-Christ-in-Christmas crosses — and had dinner at my Aunt Linda and Uncle Marvin’s new house in Edmond. (The Frisco, Texas, of OKC!) My mother — she’s become such a Tinsel groupie! — was here from Wichita, with cousin Jane.

I read and signed books Tuesday night at Full Circle bookstore in 50 Penn Place. This is a fantastic, long-lasting indie bookstore right in the heart of town. It has tall shelves and lots of nooks and crannies and  fireplaces ablaze. I have many people to thank for the reading — Kit Mauldin and the Full Circle staff, and also Carol Cole-Frowe, who organized a little happy hour for the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, which helped draw a crowd. Plenty of familiar faces turned out for the reading — some I haven’t seen since I read Off Ramp here in 2004 (Janet Martin, the Martines, the Eggers) and some I haven’t  seen since the 1980s (Kathy Judge! Jennifer Lindsey McClintock! Erin Glasgow!) and some I haven’t seen since the last class reunion. Mary (Heffron) Ramsey was there too, with her totally adorbs tyke named Joe.

Also Lou Berney was there. Ah, Lou, we meet at last. It’s downright bizarre how close Lou and I are without ever having met: He went to McGuinness (’82) and so did I (’86). He went to Loyola University in New Orleans (’86) and so did I (’90). He was editor of the Maroon (Fall ‘85) and so was I (Fall ‘87). He’s stayed in touch with Rene Sanchez all these years and so have I. He worked for a while at the Oklahoma Gazette (’87) and so did I (’88). He has a (long-awaited!) novel coming out in January (Gutshot Straight) and I just had a book come out. And yet with all the friends and places we have in common, we have never been in the same room at the same time. It seems I was always getting there just as his trail went cold. I feel like we have so much to talk about! I can’t wait to read his new book and I’ll be blogging about it soon, I’m sure.

And how can I forget Winnie and Bob McCall (Derba’s parents), right in the front row where they belong. Winnie (aka Wee-Wee) is in Tinsel’s acknowledgments. She’s a loyal fan.

So this is a very warm, fireplacey, happy room of people to read to. I decided to read the interlude that comes after chapter 6 in Tinsel. It’s called “The Gap (A Slide Show)” and it’s the part of the book where I wrote six or seven pages of memoir about the Christmases I grew up with. Oklahoma City is the only stop on this tour where reading that part of the book aloud makes sense. The prodigal son returns — one night only.

And the best part? I got the audience (about 25-30 people, maybe more?) to sing the de facto state Christmas carol with me: The B.C. Clark’s jingle. This is a TV ad that has been playing every December on local TV here almost as long as most people can remember. Eventually, Oklahoma’s schoolchildren started singing it in Christmas pageants. Later, in the 1980s, B.C. Clark started running ads of everyday Oklahomans in shopping malls, singing the jingle for the camera. To anyone from here, the Clark’s jingle is literally the sound of Christmas. Thanks to Jennifer Lindsey McClintock for helping me get everyone started. The best thing about this song is that there’s no such thing as off-tune. It seems to be just in everyone’s pitch, or it can be forced there.

Here’s the classic version:

Here’s the video of my audience and me singing it tonight — video courtesy of Jennifer’s husband, Sean:

That makes me happy. I took a long time to sign 30 or so books — because I like to gab. This is happening at every signing; sometimes I know the person and want to catch up on so much, but a lot more times, I’ve just met the person and they have a lot to tell me about their relationship to Christmas and life in general, and I want to hear it all. I may not be selling heaps of books, but it’s such a treat to just talk to people about the book or anything else.

More to come: I did more public radio today for stations in Illinois and the northeast (will post links soon) and will do some stuff with the Oklahoman newspaper tomorrow at their offices. Then it’s a quick visit with Wee-Wee and Bob and then a drive back to D/FW to catch a flight to the Pacific Northwest.

Tinsel is getting good press — and I’m grateful, even if I’ve been slow to get it posted up here. So I’m spending part of this sunny Sunday making a round-up of the last several days of my media hype machine. It’s getting harder and harder to get MSM attention for a book, but my luck is holding out, and I’m even getting notice from some non-MSM. Whether any of it makes a whit of difference in actual number of books sold remains (as always) to be seen. …

I am elated about this Laura Miller review in Salon. I’ve long admired her book reviews (and no, I don’t know her) and I’m so glad that she liked the book and got it exactly. I’ll be keeping this review handy for the inevitable day when I’m feeling low about the whole endeavor, which should come any minute now. I especially like the opening:

Every year, Christmas is directly responsible for some of the worst books to cross a reviewer’s desk: stale, overfrosted sugar cookies loaded with the literary equivalent of artificial coloring and high-fructose corn syrup. But now all is forgiven because the season has inspired Hank Stuever to write “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present,” a portrait of the holiday as it’s celebrated in the booming Dallas exurb of Frisco, Texas. A delicately calibrated combination of rigorous reporting, observational humor and old-fashioned empathy, “Tinsel” is the book that saved Christmas for this curmudgeon.

Another goody: Here’s Robert Smith’s story on the book that ran on All Things Considered on NPR Saturday (Nov. 28). I had a great time with Robert and producer Alice Winkler at Tyson’s Corner Center taping this piece a couple of weeks ago. And here’s a picture of Robert and me visiting the Tyson’s Santa Claus that day. This particular Santa is quite popular, and has been there every Christmas for many years. Last year he lost his job when the mall changed photo vendors and there was a huge outcry and protest. He’s back. (And he’s not afraid of speaking out. While Robert and I sat there and talked to him, he reminded us that “God gave his only son to mankind,”  “the ultimate gift,” and other evangelical yada-yada, which I think is sort of a no-no for secular mall Santas, but there it is. Happy Holidays and Merry CHRIST-mas!)

Speaking of radio, I had a great time appearing the other morning on the Joy Cardin show on Wisconsin Public Radio. No, readers, I wasn’t actually in Milwaukee; I talked to them from the Post’s extremely handy radio studio.

I’ve been quoted in a few stories, like this one from the Deseret News, about the holiday season and buy-buy-buy and commercialism. Economist/author Joel Waldfogel (author of Scroogenomics) and I seem to be destined to appear in a lot of stories together.

(Disturbing print trend, if you’ll notice, and more fodder for the “death of copyediting” files: I seem to be able to get my name spelled right in the first reference — it’s Stuever –but soon enough I become “Steuver” on second references and in photo captions. I had journalism profs who would flunk people for this, but I am not in the business of handing out F’s to anyone giving my book a shred of publicity. I’ve spelled my name to everyone I talk to, and gave some of these writers the only handy way to remember how to spell it that I’ve been able to come up with, besides spending beaucoup money on a web site with my accurately-spelled name splayed all over it AND having that linked from inaccurately-spelled Google searches. Anyhow, here is a surefire method to remember how to spell my name: You want “ever” to be in it. Like forever. And however, and whatever. STU-EVER. But you don’t want to say it like that. TV and radio people always ask how to pronounce it, since they generally want to take it in the “Stoyver” direction. It’s Stooooover. “It rhymes with J. Edgar Hoover” I say.)

Jeff Baker gets my name right and then some in the Oregonian. Nice piece, which ran in plenty of time to interest people in my Powell’s reading there on Friday, Dec. 4.

And I liked reading columnist, “storyteller, writer and central Ohio supply preacher” Jeff Gill’s thoughts in the Newark Advocate.

Onward, to good reviews in today’s Sunday papers: St. Petersburg Times here, and the Buffalo News here.

Also a nice little story in the Oklahoma Gazette, the alt-weekly in OKC, which makes mention of my ancient history: I was the unpaid summer intern at the Gazette in 1988. Fond memories of Randy Splaingard and Ken “Dee Dee LeDeux” Siens and the drunken night known as the “Best of OKC” issue party, held at that old rock n’roll sushi bar over on May Avenue. What was that place called?

Some more making the Yuletide gay-ness from Pink magazine (click on the dude to get a PDF version of the magazine). And in a whole other demographic, here’s Brit Mott’s story from Plano Profile magazine, including a nice picture taken at their offices/studio in October.

Finally, and mostly, if you’re in Dallas (and not thoroughly sick of me) you must pick up the December issue of D, which has a big excerpt from the book and features an amazing portrait of Tammie Parnell in her family room with heaps of Christmas finery and regalia, photographed by Misty Keasler. The excerpt is mostly about Tammie — I took some 20,000 words of the Tammie parts of the book and winnowed them down into just a taste (5,000 words) about Tammie’s world of Christmas decorating and what it means to her. Tim Rogers and his staff are a bunch of super smarties, and I’ve enjoyed getting to work with them. I’ve also enjoyed meeting them a time or two at the Old Monk for their customary cocktail hour.

The excerpt appears only in the print edition, but here’s an outtake from the photo session that Misty sent to Tammie and Tammie sent to me — it’s Tammie and her dog, Toby. If that won’t put you in a Tinsel-y holiday mood, whatever will?

It so happens that I wound up in Houston on the Monday night that the Texans were playing the Tennessee Titans, which, I gather from the traffic jams on the way to my reading at Brazos Books, was a big game for Houstonites. They lost. I care about that about this much, but I could have done without the gridlock, you sports-obsessed America, you.

Just when I was thinking maybe I should have set up a folding table with a stack of Tinsels in the Reliant Stadium parking lot instead, I edged into the bookstore to find a nice little crowd of 15 or so people – which, according to ever-optimistic Megan (my HMH publicist) is a good size in a town where we got little to no advance media interest. Brazos Books isn’t large, but it’s a cute and interesting store, and there’s a comfy couch and chairs. I put on my gold Burger King Wise Man crown and went to work!

Jeff Trykoski’s brother, Doug, and his wife Traci came to the reading – Traci is very pregnant, due in February; a Trykoski grandchild at last!

Also present was a goodly portion of a writing class from the nearby DeVry University, which was a total surprise, and a welcome one. Their teacher, one LouAnn Gottschalk, thought it would be a good idea to go see an actual writer talk about an actual book. I couldn’t agree more and I enjoyed meeting LouAnn and her students. Also in the audience was Facebook acquaintance Mark Hager. Plus some random readers who, it would seem, were just interested the book and the author. Go figure. (Thanks, LouAnn for the photos!)

Most delightfully, I got to see Janice Welch (nee Kusbel) and her husband, James, and daughter Gabrielle. Janice and I were inseparable back in high school days, but we haven’t actually seen one another in – I added it up – just shy of 20 years. We’d lost track of one another until about 2005, when Janice’s parents saw me on the Today show one morning. So I got to have dinner with them – and meet James and the amazing Gabrielle. (I’ve been an admirer of her Halloween costumes for many years, thanks to Janice’s e-mails and pictures. Once she was Velma from Scooby-Doo, then the next year she was Daphne. This year she was Gene Simmons in full Kiss makeup.) Gabrielle asked me to sign Off Ramp, too, which she is currently reading (she is in fifth grade, people!).

After the reading, James and Gabrielle went home and Janice and I went out for drinks with David Bryce, a friend of mine from the Austin days who is now an attorney in Houston. Do you ever have one of those moments where you’re sitting a table with two people who come from completely different phases of your life? I was worried about being a bridge between them, but I need not have worried: David Bryce is interested in everything and able to talk about anything; so’s Janice! We sat on the porch at a bar called Under the Volcano. Every once in awhile, beneath a top note of another table’s cigarette smoke, I got a tropical whiff of … something, some plant … magnolia? Honeysuckle? I can only describe that smell thusly: New Orleans at night. Whatever grows there grows in Houston.

Tuesday was a long but wonderful day. I got up and drove out to the Houston suburbs to see Janice some more. Gabrielle was at school, but her son, Nathan, was home. I’ve heard a lot about Nathan. He’s autistic. Really autistic. I wasn’t sure what to expect – Janice has devoted her life to teaching and caring for Nathan, who goes to a special one-on-one school for a couple hours of day. When I got there, I was immediately struck by what beautiful and mysterious boy he is. I could have watched them together all day — a mesmerizing mother-son pair. They sit in the morning and work on Nathan’s communication skills. There are moments that are absolutely divine and moments that are tense. This is Janice’s life – and James’s and Gabrielle’s. It’s not only about constantly trying to reach Nathan, but it involves a rigid, completely organic dietary regimen and a household routine where life can only be lived a few minutes at a time.

I wonder if people ever tell Janice that she’s lucky? Because that’s what I felt for her. I know it’s not easy, but he really is one of the most fascinating, handsome and interesting kids I’ve ever seen. And right away I liked Gabrielle, who seems wise beyond her years. For all the unpredictability in their lives, their house is really comfortable and easy to be in. I’m so glad I had time to visit.

But I had to go. Left Janice’s place at 12:30 to drive like Jehu for 3-1/2 hours to get to Dallas and catch a flight home – but found just enough time to have an early dinner at the Black Eyed Pea with Louis and John and my mother. I’m on the plane right now (Tuesday night) as I type this. What a week. I saw miles and miles of Texas and did five readings.

Are you waiting to hear whether or not I’ll be on the CBS Early Show in New York on Black Friday? Well, so am I. After I told everyone about it, the producer who was supposed to call just never got around to it. Lesson learned, I suppose. Maybe I’ll hear about it Wednesday, or maybe they’ll have me on some other morning before Christmas gets here. In any case, our Thanksgiving is in limbo.

Meantime, there’s some more Tinsel press, reviews, radio and TV coming. I’m reading/speaking at the Newseum on Saturday afternoon (Nov. 28) if you want to come out and join the museum crowds. (The Newseum person told me it’s their busiest day of the year.) Something to do with bored relatives!

Also, unless their plan has changed, I think there’s a story about Tinsel on NPR’s All Things Considered on Saturday. We taped it a couple of weeks ago in Tyson’s Corner Center mall. I’ll doublecheck and let the world know.

I get back on a plane Monday morning: Readings next week in Oklahoma City (Dec. 1), Portland (Dec. 4) and Bellingham (Dec. 5). Then it’s Seattle, St. Louis and New York between Dec. 7-14. Go to the home page and click “Hank’s Next Event” if you want the details.

In other news…

City Paper called on me (and Trey Graham! Among others) to help make sense of the difference (and vitality) of the Washington Blade (RIP) and Metro Weekly. What I’ll miss about the Blade was its dogged accounting of worldwide and nationwide discriminations, slights, crimes and other injustices to gays and lesbians everywhere. It was a constant reminder (sometimes a dreary one; but necessary) that every step forward for gay rights in one time zone usually entailed a step backward in another.

And the Post has decided to close its Los Angeles, Chicago and New York bureaus. You can read about it here. This move acknowledges how, bit by bit, the Post has been scaling back its ambitions as a national newspaper in favor of keeping our foreign bureaus and emphasizing a focus on all things Washington. I spent quite a bit of time with the LA bureau in its recent permutations in the last 10 years — Bill Booth, who is now the Mexico City bureau chief; Rene Sanchez, who is now a managing editor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune; Sharon Waxman, now of the The Wrap.com; my TV colleague Lisa de Moraes; and the most recent LA chief, Karl Vick – and I plan to keep going out to Los Angeles for various stories. All those Oscar seasons and other datelines I’ve had from SoCal, my idea of a bureau was pretty much a discounted room at the Beverly Hilton anyhow.

But as for the actual bureau, I’ll always remember seeing Florence Henderson. and other B-listers on their way to see one of a squillion attorneys, on the elevators of the Century City office building where we were for a long time – that was before the Washington Post Company started saving money by moving the bureau in with the Newsweek offices in Santa Monica.

If anyone wants to hire a top-flight young reporter, you can’t do better than Ashley Surdin, our LA bureau aide who is now out of a job. Here’s to you, Ashley. Hang in there.

If you’ve been reading this blog or if you know me even just a little, then you know that when it comes to memory and the past and driving around I can be a total sap. Fair warning, then. Move on or get in the passenger seat…

I lived in Austin for just a bit longer than three years — from 1996 to 1999, which was sort of like the roaring ’20s in that town, the decade everyone and everything became unbearably hip and people got rich just by being in the right action-figure-adorned cubicle farm internet start-up company at the exact right time. Being here this weekend really made it seem like forever ago.

Part of my nostalgia jag on this weekend was triggered by how much Austin has changed in terms of infrastructure (freeways, roads) and architecture (Christ, how many loft condos does a city need?). The pic above is one of those utopian developer photoshoppy-jobbies — but it’s pretty close to a fully realized vision. The smell of progress is also evident in the palpably increased density of restaurants, boutiques, and other places to spend money and pack on the fat grams. No city in America is better served by outdoor-seating-under-strings-of-Italian-wedding-lights opportunities. Austin may well be the most delicious city I’ve ever left behind (although Albuquerque puts up a pretty good fight).

More than one Austinite I encountered this weekend bemoaned what the city has become — the growth, the pace, the conspicuous consumption — but that’s always been a chief activity in Austin: complaining that it was so much better back in [fill in idyllic year here]. But I think Austin looks and feels better now, somehow. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and what I experienced this weekend felt like Austin Plus-Plus.

The basic quality of the place (happily dumpy, rusty, and stoney in more than one sense) is still intact, and so is the boundless civic pride. People have always loved living here; although it’s famous for being “laid back,” life in Austin requires of its people the most competitive style of laid-backitude. People hurl themselves into the weekend with gusto, determined to out-Austin one another: they are jogging around Town Lady Bird Lake early in the day; they are lined up for just the right breakfast tacos and brunch hot spots by 10; they are tailgating in deluxe style by noon before the UT game; they are in and out of all the right bars and night spots and arrive at favorite eateries with the reverence of hipster pilgrims. And they’re still record shopping, which gladdens me.

They’re also still voracious readers. Hooray! I read from and signed copies of Tinsel on Saturday afternoon at Book People, the lit’rature palace on West 6th and Lamar. I can only begin to guess how many hours I spent in this store back in the ’90s, fully absorbed in magazines and books. (More on that — my happily delusional, late-20s, literary life of letters back then — in a moment.)

Around 20-30 people showed up. Many of them were friends, including former colleagues from the Austin American-Statesman. Some were stray customers. More than a few were curious about the book, lured there by one hell of an article about by Patrick Beach, which ran in the Statesman on Saturday morning. More on that, too, in a moment — but here’s a snippet:

We have been here before, sort of but not really: Big-city journalist parachutes into Anywhere, USA, observes the curious folkways and mores of People Not Like Himself, writes a piece posing as fish out of water with tone of bemused detachment, which aims to fumigate persistent aroma of condescension toward his subjects.

Except this is my friend Hank Stuever, a prince of a guy, former American-Statesman writer, Pulitzer Prize finalist, brutally funny, warm and generous and a better writer than I could ever hope to be. I hate him.

Let us dispense with the notion of journalistic impartiality and the use of surnames on second reference and call the man whose talent I’m murderously jealous of “Hank.” And let’s talk about Hank’s new book, “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present,” which is about three Christmases — and three households — in the Dallas exburb of Frisco from 2006 to 2008. It’s also about consumerism, an economy that conveniently imploded and red-state Americans who go to churches where they’re told “God wants you to feel good about your boobs.”

You will definitely laugh; you will probably learn; you might get angry. The scope is huge. It’s about, like, EVERYTHING.

And it just gets better. Go read it, unless you are sicker of me than I am of myself. Pat came to the reading with his sons, Adam and Joe, and like Austin, they’re all grows up! (This has been a distinct theme of the trip so far — people keep coming to my readings accompanied by tweens, teenagers, and college students whom I remember as babies.)

Of the rest of the people at the reading was a friend with whom I once sang a duet in a high school musical; another was Helen Johnson, who I profiled in 1996, and remains such a dear friend, though we don’t hear from one another as much as we mean to. The endlessly smart and entertaining Spike Gillespie was there, which is all the approval I’ll ever need. I had a happy time doing the reading, and signed as much stock as I could.

I got to have dinner with Michelle Breyer, my Austin touchstone, now the super successful goddess of coiled locks at naturallycurly.com; Michelle is yet another person blissfully aglow with newspaperdom’s afterlife. I got to see Marques Harper and his friends at a bar on 4th Street (eek — flashbacks to Oilcan Harry’s, etc.) on Friday night, at which Marques reminded me just how bad the gay dating scene can be in this otherwise enlightened town. I got to have breakfast with Pat Beach at a relocated El Sol y La Luna.

I got to spend a few hours Sunday with Spike, who showed me quilts at the history museum, bought me lunch at Kerbey Lane and then showed me what became of the old Mueller Airport land. (The abandoned control tower is still standing, amid a cookie-cutter subdivision, and it is a wondrously spooky sight. I wonder if they still affix a NOEL sign to it during holidays? Doesn’t look like they do.)

Also? I got to drive around a lot Austin, by myself, which I hadn’t done in, gosh, 10 years. This got me in one of my moods — not sad or anything, just reflective. (Self-reflective, of course.)

What was I here?

All I could think of was how much I worked. I kept wondering about the stories: Is Stevie Ray Vaughan’s stuff still in that storage unit on South Congress, and does the check still arrive each month to cover the rent? What happened to John Guerin after he sold his Guitar Heaven store in Georgetown, and did Denny keep the oft-traded Fender acoustic forever, like he said he would? Is the roller rink off 183 and Burnet still open and do they still do adult-only skate on Tuesdays? How are the Worthingtons, the northwest Austin suburbanites I profiled? Do the old men still meet every morning in the Lockhart Dairy Queen? Is that used office equipment still in the Quonset hut east of I-35, and if so, what did it look like during this Great Recession? How’s the funeral business treating Robert Falcon these days?

I don’t actually need answers to all those questions. (And, in a happy coincidence, Lupe and Sonny Falcon saw the Statesman article, called me at the front desk at Book People, and I went over and saw them on Sunday afternoon. If you’ve read “All Faiths” in Off Ramp, the story about the discount funeral home I wrote in 1999, you know who I’m talking about. The actual All Faiths strip-mall funeral home is still on South Congress and St. Elmo, but Robert left it behind years ago and moved on; he’s now running two funeral homes in Amarillo.)

So there’s that kind of nostalgia. But also I was thinking about my former world here. I had great friends back then (many now moved away), but I was also terribly lonely sometimes. I spent a crazy amount of time reading. On Saturday morning, I walked into the Little City cafe on Congress (shabby now) just to look around for a minute recall that young(er) man who spent so much time sitting there, deep into his books and magazines, or marking up his own story drafts with a red pen. (When I was feeling flush with cash, which was maybe once every six weeks, I would shift the locale to the bar at the Four Seasons.) You could not have convinced that Hank Stuever that he’d be back in Book People reading from his own book in 10 years.

Austin is like some kind of fever dream I once had. In 1996 and ‘97, I got so down that I had to see a therapist, who had me try a variety of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, but I don’t think I was on them long enough to tell the difference, and pretty soon it was the work (and people) who lifted me out of that dark funk. What I did love was Ambien (I took one Ambien a night for almost three years — nearly my entire Austin tenure) and I wonder if this is why Austin has such a dreamy, gauzy quality in my mind.

That story Pat Beach wrote really touched me. He was under no obligation whatsoever to do such a thing, or do it with the care and thought that he did. Over breakfast Sunday morning, Pat and I caught up. When we sat two cubicles apart in the Statesman’s features department, we used to really pay attention to what the other was working on. All of us feature writers did — we had good editors and the gang of us (Kallenberg, McLeese, Garcia, Corky, Hibberd, Barnes, others) were in the same essential hunt. It was collegial and competitive; our bosses wanted it that way. We cared about that most ephemeral thing: writing feature stories.

Now here’s Pat and me talking about it over huevos and tacos like prematurely old men. I so admire Pat for sticking with it — and sticking with it in Austin, when he could have moved to a lot of other papers, when things were still ripping along. Here, in 2009, he’s one of two (two!) full-time feature section writers who have a general assignment beat. I want him to keep hitting it hard.

It’s Monday morning now. I’m packed, checked out of the hotel, and having breakfast at Magnolia Cafe and reading the Statesman, which, I have to say, given the givens, looks and reads like a paper in relatively sturdy shape. I’m still worried about the fate of feature writing, not just here but everywhere, but a piece on the Statesman’s front page Sunday by Kevin Robbins, about one of the survivors of the Aggie bonfire collapse (there’s that 10-years-ago thing, again) made me think all this fretting is hooey. It’s good.

Gregory Kallenberg, if you were here with me at Magnolia, there’d be extra jalepenos in a little plastic cup, and yes, we could do an entree split.

I’m off to Houston for a reading at Brazos Books tonight. The fact that my rental car (a black Ford Escape; apologies to polar ice caps) has an iPod jack only sweetens the deal. Yes, I went to Waterloo Records, but once again the Internet ruins everything it touches: Instead of buying a heap of CDs and a couple of LPs, I simply wandered the store for an hour and made mental notes about what to go get from iTunes.

Drove down from Fort Worth to Austin today. Last night’s reading in Fort Worth was small — 14 people plus your author — but actually calming, fun. I had people sit in a circle in the TCU Barnes & Noble cafe. I donned the Burger King Wise Man crown (hey, Laura T. Faherty: It travels well! Excellent work on the gold adornment!) and read some, and talked some, and then the group asked questions, and then the intercom voice of God said: Attention Barnes & Noble customers, we will be closing in 5 minutes. Which means: mighty fine time for a beer next door. Got to see an old friend, Jennifer LaBoon (nee Dasovich) — we go back to Oklahoma City high school days and St. Charles youth group. Also met Jeni’s (I still call her that) husband, Stephen, and adorable son, Will. And Jessie Milligan and some of her friends from the Star-Telegram, or who used to work there. And really? It seems like I spent the entire evening eating piles and piles of tortilla chips, with so much salsa that it was brought to the table in Mason jars. This is something Texas and I do very well together.

Jessie put me up for the night and fed me a splendid breakfast — more fresh fruit than I’ve had in a week. Vitamins canceling out corn chips as we speak. Jessie is so great — so wise and full of spirit and now aglow with a peaceful vibe I’ve recognized in others: She took a buyout from her newspaper job last year and has MOVED ON. I loved seeing some of her artwork, hearing about her masters’ work in library science, and staying in her lovely house with loyal ol’ Andy, her dog. In the middle of the night, there was a terrific thunderstorm — loud enough to wake me and it was just scary enough to enthrall. As for peaceful slumber, Jessie’s couch gets an A-plus.

I’m in Austin tonight — about to go wander around and invariably do more damage to my cholesterol count. Everybody had prepped me for the big changes, at least skyline-wise, that Austin has seen recently. I was ready for that, but it was the urban infill that really shocked me, too — all my beloved frontage roads north of town are maxed out with tributes to the dream of capitalism — I mean, PROGRESS. I’ll write more about Austin after the weekend is over. I’m here til Monday morning.

Speaking of life in Austin, here’s that review from the December issue of Texas Monthly by Mike Shea that I mentioned earlier this week.

If you’re actually in Austin, please come to the Book People reading Saturday at 3 p.m. I’ll be grateful to see those chairs not-so-empty.