New York scares the bejeezus out of me.

Well, okay, not quite… but America’s biggest city has long filled me with a mixture of awe and terror. Its massiveness, its bustle, its traffic… on the one hand, for an urbanite like me Manhattan is perhaps the ultimate expression of a city (though now that I’m world-travel-enhanced, Tokyo, Paris, Bangkok and Buenos Aires have been added to the roster.)

Urbanity aside, though, the town’s perceived attitude, its history of crime — on a trip here in high school, a friend and I were scammed out of $40 on arrival at the pre-Guiliani-era Port Authority bus terminal — its status as the center of so many industries — finance, publishing, the arts — has effectively guaranteed intimidation on my part.

So you can imagine my trepidation at holding a book event here.

Touching down at a greatly-remodeled JFK airport after a red-eye flight, I grabbed my bags and proceeded to a blessedly orderly taxi line. No scams this time around, though a few unofficial cab drivers still saw fit to call out “taxi! taxi!” to the waiting crowd. Some things never change. After dodging morning traffic on the Van Wyck and Long Island Expressways, we headed across Manhattan to a friend’s apartment in the now-trendified Hell’s Kitchen, the neighborhood made famous by the musical West Side Story. Like so much of Manhattan’s once-gritty neighborhoods, formerly-rundown brownstone tenements now boast upscale condos, and check-cashing places have been replaced by cafes and sushi restaurants.

But none of that for me: after a nap and a catch-up with a friend who lives in the area, I hopped on the subway downtown to McNally Jackson Books, unsure what awaited me in a city with lots of options for the literary-minded. That nagging fear every author feels reasserted itself: what if nobody shows up?

The bookstore, located in the SoHo/NoLita area, is arguably one of the more fab spots to hold an event: a gorgeously done-up cafe with a ceiling festooned with old books hanging, lamp-like, accompanying wallpaper that’s made up of old book pages. The place was bustling — always a good sign for an indie bookstore in these times.

Best part: in the center of the store sat the Espresso Book Machine, planned as a showpiece for the event. This new device just might be a lynchpin in the revolution now sweeping the publishing business: Printing books on demand is becoming more established — Wander the Rainbow is printed that way, and many backlist titles from traditional publishers are as well. But this device takes it a step further: about the size of a washer/dryer, it’s designed for retail outlets; it can print a perfect-bound paperback book in about five minutes. When I learned that McNally Jackson was going to be one of the first customers for this gizmo — and the first retail bookstore in New York City — I made the necessary arrangements to work a demo of this device into the event. In the publishing world’s mothership, this made perfect sense.

Chatting with the amiable bookstore staff and the folks from EBM manufacturer On Demand Books put me at ease; so too did the clusters of people filtering in as event time drew near. Yes! All my efforts at breaking through New Yorkers’ legendary intransigence seems to have paid off. As I continued my speech and excerpt-reading, some random bookstore patrons even sat themselves down and listened intently. I not only read my usual three excerpts, but by popular request read a fourth and responded to some questions by a noticeably enthused audience.

After the event, I had the unique experience of signing copies still warm from the EBM printer — literally hot off the press! Needless to say, I was plied with questions about indie-publishing and print-on-demand processes from some New York writers. And from some published authors as well: Lost Girls Jen and Amanda, inspiration for my journeys some three years back, were in attendence.

With this warm NYC welcome, it was time for me to get more fully reacquainted with this town, having been absent from it for almost seven years.

After a celebratory post-event dinner where we were served by a totally-cute, uber-friendly waiter at trendy gay eatery Elmo, I rose bright and not-too-early for a Midtown meander. A few New York set pieces were on show, from the bustle of Bloomingdales to the deco grandeur of the Chrysler Building (I actually went into the lobby for the first time) to the bustle of Grand Central Station.

Now scrubbed and polished and restored to its prewar grandeur, Grand Central can proudly stand shoulder-to-shoulder with its European or Japanese rail-station counterparts. En route I had to suppress a chuckle when, cruising down the street, I passed a fellow in mid-convo on his cellphone: he delivered the line, without a shred of irony, “are you fuckin’ kidding me!?”

New York set-piece indeed.

Turning west, I paid my respects to that ultimate temple of literacy, the main branch of the New York Public Library, its stone lions clad in a thin coating of snow from the night before. I’d never been inside this building before either and was suitably agape at the cavernous main reading room.

And yes, really playing the tourist, I buzzed through Times Square. The place has been so thoroughly prettified and glitz-ified that its seedy past — which I remember from a long-ago first trip to New York as a kid in the 1980s — is hard to imagine. Though I can see why some New Yorkers remain intransigent: writer Jimmy Breslin, interviewed some ten years back on the removal of sex shops and hookers and its replacement by Toys R Us and Disney stores, remarked, “Disney? I’ll take the hookers!”

Still, the place offers amazement: in addition to its bright-light insanity (rivaled only in my travels by Tokyo districts Shibuya and Shinjuku), a glance southward where Broadway and Seventh Avenues diverge reveals an incredible, dense panoply of high-rises old and new. It may have its detractors, but the district’s pulsating adrenaline rush in many respects embodies the city as a whole.

After a tasty dinner of legendary New York thin-crust pizza, time to re-explore the city’s nightlife. Things have changed a lot since I was here last, at the end of an era of mega-clubs and insanely late nights made possible by an assortment of controlled substances. Twilo, Tunnel and Roxy may be gone, but they do have successors: I managed to get a nice groove on at Rockit Fridays and managed to chat up (and then some) a couple of locals. Bollocks to the cliches: New Yorkers are no less friendly than any other city, and more so than many others I’ve explored.

Having given Midtown its due the day before, I headed downtown the next day to marvel at the cast-iron facades of SoHo, then walked all the way down to the bottom of the island, where streets are as narrow and (sometimes) as cobblestoned as any in the Old World. New York oozes ambition, urbanity, and modernity, so it’s sometimes hard to remember the city is almost four hundred years old.

Nevertheless, the heart of Lower Manhattan boasts the ultimate shrine to the future, and Mecca for me: J&R Music World, one of New York’s several discount electronics superstores that have been around since the likes of Best Buy and Amazon were nary a glimmer. Their pricing is still boss and I found myself lusting after a new TV I absolutely gotta have for my bedroom. Maybe soon.

Another herald of present and past lurked nearby: the mammoth construction site for the new World Trade Center, formerly Ground Zero and the old World Trade Center. Last time I was here it was still a smoking hole in the ground, the wounds fresh and raw. The pace of redevelopment has been slow, but at least it’s moving along: the memorial is set to open later this year on the tenth anniversary of the iconic date, and the signature building (thankfully no longer called the “Freedom Tower”) is rising up amid its skyscraping neighbors. One of my sisters was living in the city when the towers fell, and the memory of that day still resonates.

For my last evening in the city, I reconnected with more friends new and old, and went with some of them to a rather slickly-produced drag show… perhaps appropriate for a town that takes its theater seriously. Sharing a cab home with an old Chicago pal who moved here six years ago, I heard perhaps the best summary of his adopted hometown: “You find attitude in some places, but then go next door and you never know… you may be making out with a Brazilian model.”

Riding out to La Guardia airport across the Queensboro Bridge the next day, my cab passed Silvercup Studios, where the series Sex & the City was filmed — an inspirational and aspirational bit of television for so many of us (well, at least me, who’s memorized practically every episode). After an absence of so many years, the city really shone for me this time around, and I’m pleased to find my Empire State of mind restored.

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With the New Year underway — and some of us still digging out from various snow and other weather events — it’s time to get the Wander the Rainbow roadshow back on the road.

The beginning of 2011 sees us heading to America’s biggest cities — New York City and Los Angeles. While in the conventional publishing world these are typically the first spots on a book tour (to say nothing of movie premieres), in the case of a grassroots, indie-publishing effort, the calculus is reversed: we waited for Wander the Rainbow to garner momentum, and now — thanks to social networking, “backdoor” publicity, “guerrilla” marketing… plus some marketing of the more conventional kind — we’re finally ready to hit the big-time.

Well, mostly ready. I’d be remiss if I didn’t confess to some pre-event jitters. As always, we’ll be offering up some unique event goodies — prize giveaways for those of you who best answer our travel questionnaire, and (of course!) complimentary chocolates.

But for New York and L.A. we’re going one further.

In New York, our event — happening this Thursday, January 20 — is at venerated indie bookseller McNally Jackson Books. Located in the heart of historic SoHo/NoLita, this bookstore is looking to the future: they’re one of the first customers for the Espresso Book Machine, a device that prints books on demand right in the store. We’re planning to demo this groundbreaking piece of technology and maybe print off a few copies of Wander the Rainbow on demand before your very eyes. Appropriate for a city that’s often synonymous with book publishing.

For our return to the West Coast, and our debut in tinseltown, we plan an equally showmanlike event. We’ll be at Distant Lands on Monday, February 7, a bookstore-cum-travel-outfitter in the heart of Old Pasadena. Using some of the store’s travel-outfitter wares, we’ll talk about how to pack light, efficient, and fabulous for a long journey. Living out of a backpack for seven months sounds like a hardship for many — but we’ll show that it need not be.

Look forward to seeing you all on either coast!

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Just in time for the holidays, Wander the Rainbow has a book trailer up on YouTube:

For those of you unfamiliar with this little bit of marketing magic… since movies have had trailers (or “previews”) around since time immemorial, why not books as well? With the advent of point-and-click video editing software and sites such as YouTube for sharing video, the arrival of video-based promotion for books was inevitable.

Thanks to Steven Booth at GOS Multimedia for his deft compilation and editing — I think you’ll all agree this looks grand.

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I have a friend whose travels are a mystery to me.

I don’t mean he’s superspy Jason Bourne or anything like that; but rather, it’s the style of his travel I don’t get: he takes literally dozens of trips a year, including at least six to faraway international destinations. None of the trips are very long: he’s got one planned to London next month for a total of four days (this is out of San Francisco, a ten-hour-plus flight to the U.K.). When he discusses his travels, it’s mostly to highlight the business-class upgrades he’s gotten or the uber-cheap fares he’s paid.

At first this raised my hackles, as I thought, oh great, another one. But he’s not the sort who seeks to impress or to give the illusion of pomposity and wealth; au contraire, this guy’s a down-to-earth fellow with a modest studio apartment in Oakland and a job in the public sector. So what gives?

One clue came when he said, “I care more about getting the best fare and the most miles rather than the destination.” He then pointed me in the direction of FlyerTalk.com, a site I’d stumbled across some years back during my days of grueling, weekly, back-and-forth inter-city commuting that makes up the backdrop to Wander the Rainbow. As you loyal readers will note, this wasn’t exactly the high point of my life, getting on a plane every week… so why, I wondered, would someone do this voluntarily — even if it meant weekly jaunts to holiday destinations?

When I looked on FlyerTalk, I discovered my answer: I’m friends with Frequent Flyer Guy.

This persona is no doubt familiar to those who’ve seen Up in the Air, last year’s Oscar-nominated George Clooney vehicle. Clooney plays a professional “corporate downsizer” who flies around the country for work, rarely setting foot in his home base and relishing the allure of the road. When family members fret that it’s an isolating life, he replies — while walking through a crowded airport concourse, natch — “Isolated? I’m surrounded!”

While Clooney’s character does it for work, there’s a growing subset of travelers for whom fares and miles are their lifeblood: they haunt FlyerTalk and other forums, seeking those oddball last-minute super-saver deals and airline hiccups that will cost them next to nothing and earn them maximum miles (routings such as San Francisco-Honolulu-Los Angeles-Denver are not uncommon). To them, the destination is almost incidental, a mere stop on the merry-go-round of airport lounges, premium frequent-flyer status, and first-class sleeper seats. Many of them can be seen, now at year’s-end when many of us are focused on holiday prep, doing “mileage runs” — brief trips that are deliberately long in distance and low in price, for the express purpose of topping off one’s frequent flyer account (premium status on most frequent flyer programs requires flying a minimum number of miles a year).

If there’s one thing my rather unique style of travel (solo gay “flashpacking” around the world) taught me, it’s to avoid judging the way other people embark on journeys. And yet… there’s something about frequent-flyer junkies that leaves me a bit disconcerted. While I applaud any effort made by harried, overworked Americans to get out there and explore other lands, I can’t help but wonder if something’s being lost here. While I do love my perks (I scored some business class upgrades on my world journey thanks to my own now-depleted stash of frequent flyer miles), for me the transformative nature of long-haul travel is what drew me in — and the experiences and insights I garnered overseas held meaning and significance enough for me to codify them into a memoir. While not every journey can be — or need be — so memorable or monumental, I wonder if these miles junkies wouldn’t be better served by journeys longer and more psychically impactful.

But don’t let me be the final word: I’d be interested to hear what you (miles hounds included) have to say. If you’re reading this in an e-mail, please feel free to go to the blog site; if you’re already there, click on the “Comments” just below this entry to have your say.

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Last weekend marked the first Thanksgiving I shared with my youngest sister Miri, my only sibling in the U.S. and on the West Coast; interesting that we’ve both lived in this country for around a decade but have never celebrated this iconic Yankee holiday together. It’s also her first Thanksgiving as a U.S. permanent resident, further amplifying the day’s significance.

Garnering a foothold in this country was a challenge for both of us, fraught with many hits and misses as we fought our way through the gaping maw of U.S. immigration. People are often astonished to hear this — “but you’re Canadian!” — but the system is no less complex or inscrutable for we America-lookalikes as it is for the innumerable Patels and Gomezes that arrive on these shores. Though the cultural similarity no doubt helps in many subtle ways.

After a weekend of highly successful turkey gorging (picture-perfect plate at left), I ended it off with a reunion with an old Chicago friend, now living in New York and heading up a successful technology consultancy. This fellow was always a go-getter and something of a prodigy: the son of a prosperous Midwestern businessman, he graduated high school at fifteen, college at eighteen, worked on political campaigns in his youth, bought a co-op in an up-and-coming part of New York, and now heads up the building’s co-op board. Through it all he’s segued from a conservative Young Republican to a progressive Jew — a transition I could relate to, having made a similar conversion (politically at least) at the same period in my life.

Not everyone starts out a liberal at twenty only to turn establishment by thirty.

But one thing this friend let slip, now that he’s about to turn twenty-nine, haunted me: he finds birthdays depressing. And not due the usual “oh fuck, I’m turning thirty — my life is over!” melodrama that haunts so many of us gay men (myself included at that age). No, his anxiety takes a different form.

He feels he’s accomplished too little in his life.

Yes, really!

In my early days in this country some fourteen years ago, angst-ridden by career uncertainty (a movie career that was going nowhere), financial uncertainty, immigration uncertainty, and coming-out uncertainty (a situation exacerbated by some decidedly douche-y L.A. queers), I scribbled something in a journal about what I termed “the American Nightmare,” the dark corollary to the American Dream: that one’s accomplishments are never “enough” in a country where it’s drummed into us every day that “the sky’s the limit,” and “you can be everything you want to be.”

While I revere and applaud this country’s relative openness toward creative business endeavors and new technologies, I worry that it imposes commensurately grueling expectations toward its young: in a land where anyone, conceivably, could be Bill Gates or Steven Spielberg or Barack Obama, there’s always the nagging feeling that it’s one’s fault if one hasn’t achieved the commanding heights by a certain age and stage.

I think this is part of the reason career-break-style travel is so important: it allows for a personal inventory, a stock-taking of one’s life and one’s goals… and hopefully, at the end of it, a greater understanding of oneself through exposure to the world’s multitudes. This is, of course, a central theme in Wander the Rainbow. It also made up the focus of a discussion I had at a recent meeting of the San Francisco Book Club & Lecture Series, where I’ll be speaking sometime early next year.

Judging by the healthy attendance of this meetup, I’d say many of us are feeling the same vibe… and I can only hope more of us find the balance between ambition and satisfaction that often seems so elusive in these crazy times.

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Well, it was bound to happen sometime.

Wander the Rainbow got its first bit of fallout from a character in the book angry about how he was represented — and it wasn’t from one of the major players in the story.

It all went down this week in a series of text messages:

My efforts at apology and explanation fell on deaf ears, and I haven’t heard from the guy since this exchange.

It’s interesting that this comes in the face of a guest blog I wrote on gay.com about this very subject; the friend in question has a partying past — but has obviously renounced it, Dr. Laura-style. While I certainly don’t judge those who make a choice to lead a more, shall we say, traditional existence, I still find it amazing (and sometimes a bit disturbing) how so many gays have run in the Betty Crocker direction in recent years. Having led a cloistered, closeted existence in my own youth, I celebrate the openness in urban gayland to live an unconventional romantic and sexual life. I felt I’d depicted this friend in the same light… but obviously that’s not how it was taken.

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I’ve long been ambivalent about Canada’s largest city.

Moving to Hogtown (as it’s colloquially known) to pursue a film career during Montreal’s secessionist-besotted 1990s at first felt like salvation… but it didn’t take long for my adopted homeland’s flaws to come to the fore: like my previous stop on this trip, Boston, Toronto’s not known as a particularly warm or inviting city.

Its physical face is equally inscrutable: with a weak architectural heritage (unlike its palatial Great Lakes cousin, Chicago), Toronto’s often accused by rival Montrealers (and others) of being a bland urban space, endless glass-box high-rises making up the bulk of its cityscape.

My recent trips there have only affirmed the stereotypes: although I have a warm circle of friends who call the city home, my forays to nightspots have met with mixed success: folks were distant, regarding my adopted-Yankee friendliness and approachability with disdain. More than once, while attempting to strike up a conversation with a fetching guy or two, I had the prospect simply walk off mid-convo.

Suffice it to say, I was a bit nervous about holding a book event in this town.

At least I did my homework: the event was respectably promoted, with listings in all the major newsweeklies and a terrific radio interview care of the folks at CIRR 103.9 PROUD-FM. But I’d been in this boat before and been let down, I mused, as I walked into Glad Day Bookshop, one of the world’s oldest LGBT bookstores. The store, too, has had its share of trials of late, struggling, as many indie bookshops have, to stay afloat in the ever-changing literary marketplace. But I was determined to hold my event there for a number of reasons: in addition to Holistic Ideas Press’s support for indie bookstores, many years ago, a younger and more closeted me nervously wandered in to Glad Day to buy my very first gay-themed book.

Maybe it was karma from coming full circle, but early signs were hopeful: at the scheduled time (punctuality for a book event? really?) people began filing in, asking “is there an event here tonight?” In addition to friends and relations (and wonderfully supportive workmates — my day job has an office out in T.O.) I soon learned the reason for the large number of younger folk in attendance — as with many literary events, my readings have tended to attract something of an older crowd: a group from George Brown College had decided to make the book and the event a case study for a sexual diversity class. Say what you want about Toronto the Good (as it’s been known from its boring Protestant past), it’s a town where people show up — and on time to boot. We filled up the store and nearly sold out every copy of Wander the Rainbow in stock, our most successful event since the launch in June. Thanks everybody!

After the requisite drinks post-reading, I wandered the city’s main “gay drag,” Church Street, with an old friend — one with whom I made my first equally nervous semi-closeted forays to gay bars all those years ago. Gazing at the shimmering skyscrapers and the CN Tower in the distance, I regained that feeling for the city I’d once had and lost: Toronto’s not a place that inspires passion or excitement. But it does the so-called “hard things” well: orderly public transit, schools & hospitals, a gay community that’s good about supporting its creative crowd big and not-so-big. Like the city itself, the audience at my reading was quieter and more subdued than those in ebullient America. But they came, they saw, they listened, and they bought. For a second time in a lifetime, this oft-inscrutable place buoyed this itinerant homo in his artistic pursuits, and for that — at least from where I’m standing — this city gets a grade from me that’s far better than Good.

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The first stop on my autumn mini-book tour is where the book began: Boston, Massachusetts.

Well, not quite my first stop; on the evening of my flight I’d found out Armistead Maupin (of Tales of the City fame) was speaking about his new book, another installment in his Tales universe set in the present day, Mary Ann in Autumn. The event was at A Different Light Bookstore, the same spot where I’d had my launch event several months ago.

I had good turnout for my event, but it was dwarfed by what Maupin got — the place was packed to the rafters. Then again, he’s been writing books for almost as long as I’ve been alive, so chalk one up to the power of gradual fan-building; he discussed his early days of having to churn out 800 words on a regular basis for the San Francisco Chronicle back in the day, and the endless process of negotiation of what he could and could not include in the newspaper serial that would one day become these bestselling books. I even managed to meet the man himself, had him autograph a copy of his book, and gave him an autographed copy of my book. A bit weary from the deluge of fans, when he learned I was flying out that night to do a couple of events he nodded and said “good.” The man’s a pro; he knows the drill.

One MUNI Metro, BART train, red-eye Virgin America flight, and cab ride later, and I found myself at my friends’ Sean and Kyle’s front door in the really cute Savin Hill neighborhood of Dorchester, in Boston. I had to hurry my ass over there as I had a scheduled radio interview with CIRR, 103.9 PROUD-FM, Toronto GLBT radio station. In true book tour fashion, here I was, bleary-eyed in advance of an event that night while talking up my next event with hosts Richard & Chris in Toronto. Believe me, it’s not as glamorous as it sounds! Check out the podcast of the interview here.

Some serial napping with my pals’ uber-friendly cat, and I was ready to head out for my event. I was, understandably, a bit trepidatious after my not-so-fantastic turnout at my event in Berkeley a couple of weeks back. Would this be a reprise of that fiasco?

I arrived at Trident Booksellers & Cafe to find the place almost as packed as A Different Light was the night before. No, alas, the crowd wasn’t, for the most part, there explicitly to see me… though a number of folks loped in as the evening wore on, having seen the piece in the Boston Globe that ran earlier that day. But it didn’t matter so much, given the overall bustle of the joint; although starting out felt a bit like a comedian at an open-mic night, by the end of my reading a number of otherwise-preoccupied folks were listening with interest, and a number of fence-sitters were convinced enough to buy the book. Mission accomplished!

Best of all was the venue itself and its friendly, warm, and wonderful staff: Trident has really taken the bookstore/cafe hybrid model to its logical apex, with a full-service bar & cafe that fills up evening after evening. This is the secret for emerging indie authors like myself who are only starting to build a following: partner up or ally with retailers and groups where you can build synergy. In the case of Trident, they really ran with the event and had their chef prepare selections that matched chapters in the book… you can guess what I had for dessert last night.

The best part, however, came afterward, as I segued from speaker to guest and caught up with my Boston posse late into the evening. As with my world trip itself, these book events offer the opportunity for a global nomad like myself, with commensurately far-flung friend circle, to reconnect with the latticework of compadres scattered far and wide.

Riding back to the airport, where I now sit, brought back a flood of memories and associations; the Silver Line bus was a route I took weekly back in the days before my world trip, and I was again transported to those hurly-burly days of consulting-driven travel, liver donations, and all the other forces that led me to where I am today. Funny how a gunmetal-gray piece of mass transit can hold so many associations.

To all of you who came to see me, my hearfelt thanks; for those in the Boston area and interested in buying the book, copies are still available at Trident now and into the holiday season.

Next up: Toronto!

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It’s been a weekend filled with launches, dreams, and hopes.

Yesterday I was excited to attend my friend Jamil Moledina’s book launch. His new book — like mine, his first — Tearing the Sky is a magnificently compelling work of “hard science-fiction” — an oft-overlooked sub-genre of speculative fiction that deals with “real” science and humanity’s prospects for harnessing it in the far future. The really far future, in his case: the book is set 360,000 years hence, yet still features a college-age protagonist dealing with dating and female angst. It’s Isaac Asimov by way of Boy Meets World.

His event was a boffo success, with a full house at Borderlands Books, San Francisco’s sci-fi bookstore. They gave a big plug to indie publishing (Jamil did it this way as well, with some help from yours truly, after encountering endless frustration at the hands of a small-time L.A. publishing house); it’s good to see indie bookstores embracing their indie author kin — something I wrote about some months back.

This morning I had brunch with my friend Steven at Home, one of the Castro’s many breakfast joints teeming on a Sunday noon (what is it with gay guys and brunch, anyway?) Steven was at one time probably the perfect example of the changing tide of the city; far from a place where unconventional folks went to “just be,” San Francisco’s turned into another major (expensive) world center like London or New York — places described by the protagonist in Eat Pray Love in one word: “ambition.” When I met Steven in 2007 he seemed hell-bent on becoming a software mogul a la Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, with all the competitiveness and careerism that entailed.

But then, like me, something changed. After a flame-out of a relationship of his own, he too tried something different: he went to Buenos Aires for a month and had the time of his life. But that only left him craving more: he’s now seriously contemplating going away for longer, maybe doing some sort of Four Hour Work-Week type of arrangement, blending work and travel for an extended period on the road. Toward the end of our meal, he delivered a surprising line: he thanked me for being an inspiration.

I couldn’t believe it. Really, me? Further evidence, I suppose, that one’s life adventures have the capacity to incite others — even if that wasn’t the goal.

Feeling suitably inspired, and with some book-tour travels of my own about to start (and with the weather unseasonably glorious in normally chilly San Francisco), I hopped on my little scooter and did something everyone living in a major tourist destination should do once in a while: see their hometown anew.

Rolling up Nob Hill, then northward toward “crookedest” Lombard Street, I headed west into the Presidio, finally reaching Fort Point. America’s only all-brick fortification on the Pacific, it sits perched at the southern edge of the narrow inlet known as the Golden Gate. Above it climbs a spider web of orange girders that make up the start of the Golden Gate Bridge — yes, bridge builders of the 1930s had a unique challenge not only in siting a span over a windy, foggy waterway, but also gently threading it over a historic Civil War-era structure. The result, as with so many places in San Francisco, is sublime.

Sitting on the western bastion of the fort watching the sun sink into the Pacific, I found myself joined by a small-scale modeling photo shoot. A reminder that this is still San Francisco, as the skinny, leggy model was wearing an outlandish outfit, with crazy-colored hair pulled up in an impossible knot. No doubt this is another lynchpin in the aspirations of the young photographers and the model herself. And another reminder that this metropolis perched at the end of the Western Hemisphere remains a land of fancy, of dreams… a jumping-off point for endeavors, and travels, great and small.

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That’s an apt description of my last week.

It began auspiciously enough, with the San Francisco Giants winning the World Series, making me a four-time inhabitant of a city where the home team won such an honor on my watch (for the curious, Toronto in 1993, Boston in 2004, Chicago White Sox in 2005, and now here in San Francisco in 2010).

The euphoria was short-lived for me, as I found myself battling a touch of the flu as Election Day came looming the next morning. Nevertheless, I hauled myself over to my neighborhood polling place and voted for the second time ever in a U.S. election and the first time in person — during the last election two years ago I faxed my vote in from an Internet cafe in Vienna, and watched the returns roll in from a sports bar in Prague.

Nothing so exciting for me this time around, as the flu kept me home and put the kibosh on a planned party I was going to host. Instead, I rested up in preparation for my big event — the last Wander the Rainbow appearance of the year at Pegasus Books in Berkeley.

The best laid plans…

I’d promoted the event extensively, with postcards and posters in and around the Castro and downtown Berkeley. I’d reached out to LGBT campus groups, all of whom seemed most interested and receptive. I posted it on event calendars and contacted local media. For this event, I even opted to try something a bit different: offering prize giveaways — a Wander the Rainbow T-shirt, a matching mug, and a premium membership by my sometime sponsor and partner in crime, gay.com. On my Facebook invite a bunch of people who’d never heard me before RSVP’d in the affirmative. It all looked promising.

Arriving a bit early, as I typically do, I found the store pretty much deserted; a smattering of patrons browsing and row upon row of empty seats in their mezzanine where they hold events. OK, no surprise there. A few friends and acquaintances showed up as event time rolled around, but aside from them and one or two others… well, we gave it a bit more time. Five minutes, ten, fifteen…

Where is everybody?

It’s the fear that haunts every author or event planner: what if you host an event and nobody shows up? Although the friends who came out still managed to make the event lively and fun — and the prize giveaways were a definite hit — this was nevertheless a decidedly humbling evening after several successful or (in the case of the launch) jam-packed events with sell-out sales for Wander the Rainbow. Alas, it looks like I’m not alone: mystery author Parnell Hall had the presence of mind (and sense of humor) to cook up this hilarious YouTube ditty about his similar experience in book-event-land.

Happily, the week ended on an up note: a couple of e-mails and Facebook messages from readers who’ve been greatly enjoying the book did a lot to lift my spirits and make me feel this whole publishing adventure hasn’t been a fool’s errand. Then, to cap it all off, I jaunted down to L.A. for a quick overnight to catch my brother-in-law — indie producer, actor and writer Joseph McKelheer — hosting a launch of his own, the premier of Hamill at the prestigious AFIFest.

Joe and his team have been working on Hamill for five years (longer than the timespan of my liver donation, round-the-world trip, book writing and release for WTR combined), and the results have paid off: it’s a beautiful, uplifting story of Matt Hamill, the first-ever deaf UFC fighter and three-time NCAA champ. More than just a Rocky for deaf people, the movie manages emotion without undue sentimentality, a broad biopic sweep without epic length.

Perhaps ending the week this way serves as reminder to those of us flogging our creative wares: it’s a slow process, beset with triumphs and setbacks. But we do it, ultimately, to communicate, to share those stories we find meaningful (ours and others) with the world… and have them elicit the same feelings of hope, struggle, and human drama in others that they had for us.

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