Apparently the Hideout was filled to capacity last night and they couldn’t let everyone in, so if you’d come to see me and trucked all the way on down to the bar’s weirdly remote and semi-industrial location only to be turned away, I owe you a drink.

The show was a blast. The only trouble with reading at events like these is that I don’t get to spend all that much time just sitting in the audience, and everyone was so funny that I hated missing any of it. Readers were: Mark Bazer, who was one of my favorites from Funny Ha-Ha 1 in the fall, Todd Dills from The 2nd Hand, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Leonard Pierce, who read this thing which you must read, and Annie Logue, who was funny enough to make me suspect that the very serious-looking hand on her webpage is not actually hers. Plus some really fucking hilarious films.

I read a couple of short chapters from the book as well as couple of excerpts from my summer camp story, which is going to be in an anthology called Sleepaway to be published in June. A couple people were asking me about it, and there’s a page up at Amazon already, and I’ll keep an eye out for other places with ordering info.

Oh, and go buy books by Claire Zulkey and John Green, since it was their idea to throw this shindig in the first place.

I�ve spent the past couple of days being the exact opposite of the Ironwoman I was last week, acting like a total delicate flower in the wake of blizzards and colds and lots of work, but really, I�m milking it all I can before I start in with the three-days-a-week-for six-weeks early morning boot camp class next week. Jesus fuck, I signed up for more of that stuff, despite the torture from before. I�m like the Patti Hearst of fitness. MY NAME IS TANYA NOW!

I have gotten addicted to reading all these lovely weblogs and articles about promoting your book, and while some days I feel like I’m being very helpful to my book’s cause just by reading these sites, other days they make me all like, “oh my God it’s three months to publication have I memorized the promotional copy of my book yet so I can recite it to people I sit next to on the bus? Why haven’t I called the restroom advertising people to check rates yet?! Or arranged for somebody in the taco mascot costume to stand on the street and hand out postcards?! Because everyone says that if you don’t allow at least twelve solid weeks of taco costume campaigning you’re doomed, you’re screwed!” Then I have to breathe into a paper bag.

I did get my first postcards, though. I did not know what 1000 postcards looked like. Now I do.

Two places where I’ll be very soon:

1.) At the Hideout tonight. I think you know the drill but click here if you don’t. I’ll be on the bill with some cool people, including Amy Krouse Rosenthal, whose new book comes out this week and who is getting the word out with a method that is way better than a taco costume.

2.) Guest-blogging for Maud Newton tomorrow. So if you’ve wondering why I haven’t posted as much this week, it’s because I’ve been saving it for Maud. That makes it sound like I took a vow or something, which I didn’t, THOUGH I SO WOULD FOR MAUD.

I need a nap now. See you later. And elsewhere…

Is my server still being wonky? Yes? No?

1.) Boot camp, Day Ten: Oh my God sweet Lord Jesus H. Christ on a holy flying fiddlestick good golly Parliament Funkadelic almighty balls of flaming firey fire, I’m done.

2.) Hey look! A poster for next week’s thingy.

3.) I’m taking suggestions for other features the Book-Touring Femmebot ought to have. Those of you who have attended or given book readings are welcome to drop a line in the comments.

4.) If you didn’t catch the discussion the over at One Good Thing about whether or not this Dilbert cartoon was insulting and whether or not Scott Adams was kidding when he further explained his point by saying “It’s just a fact that women get a seratonin rush from shopping,” you can still read the really hilarious comments from the orginal post, including comments from Adams, too, as well as the follow-up post. (Though keep in mind the discussion seems pretty much over at this point, and I doubt anyone on either side needs any more comments on their behalf.)

5.) I think this has been the longest four-day week of my life. That is all.

6.) Either Blogger or my server has been acting up this week, which is why I haven’t posted as much. I’ve been too tired to worry about it much.

Maybe one night sometime in the future I will be in the parking lot of a Miami nightclub minding my own business, when a well-known rap artist and/or producer and/or promoter extraordinaire will step out of the building escorted by several bodyguards at the precise moment a late-model black Escalade with tinted windows careens past the entrance with a menacing shriek of tires skidding on asphalt, and shots will ring out, and the bodyguards will pop a few back, and then, just a second later, some instinct will compel me to put one leg out, extend the other leg back, and, keeping my feet carefully aligned at shoulder width, dip down and execute a perfect squat lunge just as a bullet zips overhead and misses me by a few inches.

Because there has to be a reason I did about a hundred and fifty of those fuckers today, right? Right?

(Day Five of boot camp: you know how in movies like Mad Max and Conan the Barbarian there’s always an elaborate forced-labor scene involving lots of extras chained to some kind of giant carousel of torment that they have to propel all by themselves by pushing and/or pulling and all the while they’re grunting and shuffling along looking sort of passive-aggressive, but really you know they’re supposed to be exhausted? You know? I forgot what my point was. Anyway. Ow.)

I keep meaning to mention that I’m going to be reading at the Hideout on the 26th in yet another people-reading-funny-stuff extravaganza hosted by Zulkey and John Green. I might pick a short selection from the book, but I’ll be reading other things, too. You should come. The films are funny.

Speaking of readings, did you see how Margaret Atwood went and invented this thing that signs books from a remote location? No, really: Margaret Atwood totally invented a robot arm that signs books. That’s just surreal. Wouldn’t it be great if writers just did that stuff all the time? Like if David Foster Wallace just came up with some crazy precision laser beam that can render legible footnotes in microscopic -15pt type, or Tom Wolfe devised an electromagnetic wand to detect irony in sex scenes? Personally I would improve on the book-signing invention by solving the women-writers-can’t-get-male-groupies problem at the same time. That’s right–I would build a Book-Touring Femmebot, with Realdoll parts and NPR personality. Among its many features it would adminster a stun-gun-like shock to anyone who says something like, “So your book, it’s really just chick lit, right?” or “Why aren’t you on Oprah?”