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I’ve just returned from five weeks on the road. The Bay Area, Northern California wine country, France, Bouchercon, Detroit, Chicago, New York. Too many airports, too many planes, but that’s the price you pay.

You don’t know what’s going to happen your first time out on the road. Will a reading draw a crowd, or will you be snuffed out? One thing you can say for sure: You’re gonna be surprised.

Even the most intimate events yield astonishing moments: Seeing K.K. Beck at the Mystery Bookshop in Seattle; finding old customers of Campagne at “M” is for Mystery in San Mateo; reading in the poetry room at City Lights, one of my most sacred book spaces on the planet; sitting across from a retired homicide detective at Copperfield’s in Santa Rosa; having dear friends from Seattle appear at Readers’ Books in Sonoma.

And then there are the unexpected, impossible-to-imagine experiences of the tour, most notably the astonishing “happening” put together by Toby Barlow in Detroit at which 200 artists, hipsters, and underground entrepreneurs showed up; food prepared by Dave Mancini of Supino Pizzeria, Torya Blanchard of Good Girls Go to Paris Crepes, and Pete’s Gourmet Chocolates; wine selected by Joseph Allerton of Roast; words from the prose poem that opens the novel projected on the façade of the Park Shelton’s rooftop; the whole event anchored by Leopold’s Books. Une grande soirée, if there ever was one.

I recommend the combination of wine and books. Holding court in a corner of Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant the afternoon of Kermit’s Provence Festival; weaving a wine tasting through my reading at The Book Cellar in Chicago; and having Brandon Wright of New York Vintners pouring a lovely Chablis and Bourgogne Rouge for the folks at Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan. Helps break the ice.

I apologize for launching a blog and then disappearing for two months. Restaurant consulting can do that to you—very intense work that grabs you by the jugular and doesn’t let you go.

The novel is out in the world, finding its way. I just returned from Santa Fe where the book was officially launched at a reading and signing event at Garcia Street Books. Edward and Eva Borins, the owners, could not have been more gracious. It was lovely, and we even sold a few books.

What I’m learning in these first few weeks of reading and signing and tasting is that the point of connection for many readers is wine: which wines you’ve enjoyed, which you’ve disparaged; the wineries you’ve visited; the viticultural geographies with which you’re familiar, even intimate.

I love this—that I can meet a total stranger but that we’re not strangers because we share a knowledge about a particular wine or winery, a vineyard or a tasting room, and suddenly we’re talking as if we had been there together only yesterday.

We’re accustomed to speaking of the “food chain,” but for some years I’ve been talking and writing about the “wine chain.” As sommeliers, restaurant professionals and wine retailers travel to meet winemakers all over the world, they bring to their restaurants and shops a sense of personal connection. I did this annually to renew and nurture my own relationships, visiting vineyards and cellars to taste and see and learn.

As a restaurateur I realized that I occupied a unique place on this chain as it stretches from winemaker to consumer. Now, as a writer, it would appear that I occupy no less special a place and relish meeting readers who love wine and feel that they know the characters and locales in my novel.

I look forward to meeting more of you down the road.

Santé!

People say to me, “You’ve written a book! That’s fantastic!”

This isn’t precisely accurate. I wrote a story. Taking a story someone has written from manuscript to book is another “story” altogether.

I write to write: To explore certain questions I’ve posed to myself, to play with language, to follow characters who interest me and see where they lead me. Writing proposes its own peculiar grace.

Rick Simonson, a dear friend and one of the great booksellers in the country, may have put it best after reading a few hundred pages that, in my mind, constituted a finished piece of work: “Yeah, I think there may be a book there.”

What I considered “done” was just the beginning.

I have been unusually blessed in the copains I have found along the way. Eric Overmyer and Richard Rosen read early, unformed versions of the manuscript and provided a little “tough love.” Patrick McNierney and Judy Hottensen gave me faith at an early stage that it might find its way into print and encouraged me to persist. Jim Crumley read it a year before he died and called me a “shithead” for writing so well—high praise, indeed—and said the story made him hungry. Jim Fergus sent the manuscript to his agent, Al Zuckerman at Writers House, who became my agent. Jim Harrison told Charlie Winton he should consider the novel.

Al Zuckerman, an astute line editor in addition to being a masterful literary agent, put me through a year and a half of grueling rewrites. Charlie said he would consider the novel but only on the condition that I work with an editor before he’d make a decision. He put me in touch with Michele Slung, an old pro, with whom I worked for two years before Charlie accepted the manuscript. And then I worked with Michele for another year to prepare the novel for publication. Maybe seven or eight rewrites in all.

This relationship—that between a writer and an editor—is an especially intimate one, and to say that I was blessed in mine with Michele is an understatement. In many ways, she saw the book more clearly than I did. She could be quite ruthless in her cutting and commentary, but coaxed and encouraged and praised. The story would not have metamorphosed into a book without her.

Once Charlie accepted the novel, another process commenced: copyediting, proofreading, body and cover design, marketing. Julie Pinkerton, Sharon Donovan, Laura Mazur, Tiffany Lee and April Wolfe—the “midwives” of Counterpoint—have been patient in their tutelage of me as an author, and I wouldn’t have given birth to this book without their help.

There’s an explosion of self-publishing going on at the moment prompted by the cataclysmic changes in the industry. Even Amazon and Apple have now announced their intention to get into the “self-publishing” business, and Lulu.com begins to resemble a stripped down version of an “indie” to a remarkable degree.

But there’s utility in an industry that compels a writer to chip away at the rough material he or she has fashioned. The first question most people ask me about Dead in the Dregs is, “How long did it take you to write it?” A long time. Probably six years, if you cut out the early “scribbling” phase.

It was worth it.