There is always so much to do after a tour - emails to say thank you to the bookstores, publicists, journalists and of course publishers who worked so hard to make your tour successful. Most enjoyable, is starting to receive emails from readers who have had the chance to read Sepulchre in the time it has taken me to get back to the UK and unpack my suitcase.

And oh dear me! My suitcase! In every corner, tiny cards, scribbled names and numbers on scraps of paper. I had to buy a new bag half way home as the old one couldn't stand the pace ...

So this is my first post for a couple of weeks. For all of you who have been following the blog - and even responding to it - thank you for your patience.

For most authors there is a period of trying to get back into the step of your regular, day-to-day life. All the post and work that has accumulated while you've been away. Nothing ever goes away! So, the days since returning home, have been filled with the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (of which I'm Co-Founder/Honorary Director) shortlist announcement and the London Bookfair. Held in the west of London, it's a great way to catch up with your foreign publishers - this time, I met for the first time my Slovenia and Brazilian publishers, as well as old friends such as my editor from Germany.

This is the nature of publishing nowadays, a mixture of long, private weeks, months, where you are writing and see nobody much except your family. Then, bright and intense bursts of very public activity - talking, interviewing, hearing about how Sepulchre will be published in other countries in the next 18 months.

Also, of course, planning future trips. Bulgaria, next, to take part in an inaugural writing festival set up by the academic and bestselling American novelist, Elizabeth Kostova.

But, for now, a few days of peace and quiet in the Sepulchre ...

A bientôt

Wednesday 9th April, and to Phoenix Arizona for the last gig of the tour (well, bookshop event). Last night at Warwick's in La Jolla, San Diego, will be hard to beat - a fabulous audience, meeting with a Bookclub earlier, lots of fabulous questions and leaving armed with a few more (hardback!) books for research - but if anything's going to come close, it will be the legendary Poisoned Pen in Phoenix. Many of my friends - crime writers, mostly - have appeared here, so I'm thrilled to be finishing the 2008 Sepulchre store in a place where so many writers have read, talked, met readers.

Putting together a novel is much like being on tour. A combination of location, characters, a storyline, ideas. And one of the best things about being on tour is that there is plenty of time to think. As a writer, the temptation is always to rush in, to be at the computer, putting words up on the screen for the sake of feeling that you're working. Often, writers do not allow themselves enough time to simply think, to let the characters come to you - rather than you imposing your will upon them - to let the story gently find its shape.

These past ten days on the road, have been important for the next novel. Not just in terms of reading and researching, although that has happened, but as much as for the ideas I've had time to discard as well as adopt. I don't feel clearly, quite, about where the next novel is going, nor the story line, nor even the leading characters. But I do feel certain about the location, the period of history, maybe even the title - which, of course, to fit, needs to be a single, three-syllable word like Labyrinth or Sepulchre!

A hint? Egypt in the 1920s, the magnificence and terror of the desert. A little family history thrown in, both distant and more recent. More than that, I'm not sure. All I do know is that the novel is now in my mind, deep down, writing itself while I travel.

Home tomorrow. Phoenix to New York, New York to London (and the current horror that is Heathrow Airport).

Thank you for joining me on this voyage around the US.

A bientôt.

Kate

Penultimate day of the 2008 Sepulchre tour, and an early start, driving along the Pacific Coast Highway (star of so many songs and movies), to San Diego. I'm staying in the Westgate Hotel, which is ornate and gilded and beautiful in a fin-de-siècle kind of a way. I have no difficulty imagining my 19th century heroine, Léonie, and her brother Anatole taking tea in the lobby, sitting in dinner suits and evening dress, fanned and gloved, watching the palm trees sway in the breeze.

Tonight, another independent bookshop - Warwick's in La Jolla. This evening, before the public event at 7.30pm, I'm meeting with Warwick's BookClub, the first time I've had the opportunity to do this on the trip. I loved meeting BookClub members, although it's sometimes daunting, in that they often have read your work so closely - and more recently than you've written it - that they have picked up all sorts of tiny, intricate details. Tonight, I expect to talk as much about my last novel, Labyrinth, as my current, Sepulchre. After more than a week on the road, it's the readers and audience members who contribute as much to the event as the author!

So, if you're in the La Jolla area for an hour this evening, come along. Now the trip is nearly over, I'm feeling nostalgic and want to meet as many real live readers as possible, before I head back to England on Thursday.

A bientôt ...

Kate

Monday 7th April and the sun is shining in Los Angeles. In each city on a book tour, authors are looked after my media escorts. I struck it lucky in LA with Claudia, LA born and bred and just the best advertisement for the city. A whistle stop tour, pointing out all the legends and the landmarks (handy for a blog), the beautiful Ocean always just at the edge of our vision, and everywhere so green and filled with red, yellow, orange and purple flowers.

Another drop-in book signing, in Barnes and Noble, which finished with us browsing in the kitchen specialist shop 'Sur la Table' opposite and a promise from the manager, John, to cook me his signature pasta dish next time I was passing through.

Vromans is one of the most famous of independent bookstores in America, out in Pasadena, so I was thrilled to be invited to give a talk and a signing, a date added quite late to my tour schedule.

The audience was fantastic - asking the sorts of questions all authors dream of answering in public, about process, about inspiration, about character. Most exciting of all was that Katie, introducing the event, had noticed the 19th century design of Sepulchre, complete with black title page, so had acquired a silver and a gold pen for me to use in the signings. I've been wanting this the whole tour, so it made the evening even more memorable.

As you can see, the business of flying, room service, talking, then starting all over again the next morning, is starting to get to me! But, I love LA, I loved the event, and found myself, as a result, answering the 'what are you working on next question' even more comprehensively than usual. In fact, I learned quite a lot about what I was intending to do last night, just listening to myself!

I'll be sorry to leave. And, next time, hope to be able to come for the Book Festival at the end of April and meet other - and local - authors.

A bientôt. And, hopefully, not too long.

Kate

Sunday on a book tour can feel like wasted time - often, you're half way home, so although you appreciate having a day off, at the same time you'd like to keep working. But when you're English and find yourself in California, obviously the sun puts a whole different complexion on the situation.

After a lunchtime book signing and talk, in the wonderful Book Passage - where I bought yet more books (suitcase is dangerously close to the weight limit now) and was handed a note from a friend, crime writer Denise Mina, who'd appeared at the bookshop a week before - I visited a few other bookshops in the city. It can be a salutary experience, as an author, walking in unannounced and off the street and offering to sign stock - first, they might not have any copies at all; second, they might have so few that they can't find them; third, it might just put the poor floor staff under too much pressure ...

But Borders in Union Square, San Francisco, was amazing. Not only had they plenty of copies of Sepulchre and prominently displayed, but we set up an informal signing sitting cross legged in the Mysteries department and chatted to customers passing through. It reminded me, as always, of how booksellers, both here and at home in the UK and France, are so passionate about what they do. Enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and very interesting. You learn more from a bookseller working the shop floor about what's selling and what is not than ever from the review pages or even the publishers!

So, a huge thank you to Borders in Union Square for their welcome and hard work on Sepulchre's behalf. (And sadness at the loss of another independent bookstore, Cody's, on the corner opposite.)



A bientôt.

Kate

Day 7 (I think!) and really looking forward to my event at the legendary Book Passage at 2 o'clock (WST).

Last time I was there, I had a dreadful cough- the audience was very patient - and we were caught in a downpour of Biblical proportions. This afternoon, fingers crossed, it will be more peaceful ....

Waiting and up early, I walked around San Francisco and I found myself at breakfast time near Fisherman's Wharf. I headed straight for Boudin's, the amazing bread/sour dour specialist bakery and store on the Waterfront. Over the tannoy system was playing David Bowie singing This is Not America, followed by Kim Wilde taking the opposite point of view with her 80s hit, Kids in America.

For those of you who've been following my blog on a regular basis, you'll know that I've spent a certain amount of my travelling time over the past week with American-themed songs playing in my head, so it seemed extraordinary that, again, I should have come in for breakfast at exactly the time that those particular - and rather old - pop songs should be playing. Coincidence or serendipity, the twin buzzwords of the tour so far.

It was precisely this sort of coincidence that led to the American 21st century heroine of Sepulchre, Meredith, coming from Milwaukee as her birthplace. When I toured there for Labyrinth in 2007, as I checked in to the Hotel Pfister in sub zero temperatures, over the music system came the sounds of Debussy. I've written about this before, but Bowie and Wilde made me reflect on how so much of being a novelist is about being a jackdaw. Noticing everything, being curious about everything, filing everything away in a mental folder marked 'Useful/Misc', just in case you might find a use for it one day.

This, for me, is in miniature, an explanation of how my plots start to take shape.

First comes location, supported by ideas and themes - in Sepulchre, music and art, Tarot and ghosts, the relationship between America and France at the turn of the last century. Simultaneously, the characters start to live and breathe inside their skins, until they're independent of me, the author. The plot settles, finally, from the fact that the characters behave, well, in character. The basic story is there, of course, but the twists and turns come from how the characters act, move, think, interact, driving the action forward.

So sitting in Boudin on the waterfront this morning, I thought of Meredith as Bowie kept me company, and couldn't imagine her eating the food I was eating, or enjoying listening to the songs coming over the music system. But ...

... I did start to get the first inklings of another character who might just have sat in such a cafe, looking at the monstrous seagulls and the tourists and the cable cars.

Maybe the heroine of my next novel? We'll see.

A bientôt.

Kate

Day six, and to CostCo outside of San Francisco to sign stock. It's a strange experience. Although we have some 15 branches of CostCo in the UK, I've never seen one or been inside and, to start with, its huge warehouse-like dimensions overwhelm me.

Between the juice and the clothing, there's a mountain of copies of Sepulchre waiting to be signed. Above my head, a huge poster like a medieval banner at the joust. I'm not hopeful. It's Saturday lunchtime and the shop is full of families and young children, tasting food on display, stocking up on industrial sized packs of shampoo, vitamins, oranges, television. It doesn't seem likely that hardback fiction will be at the top of anyone's shopping list ....

I wait. Sign a few copies, wait a little more. Then, gently, readers start to come.

A father about to go on a long air flight to visit he son in Israel buys the first copy. One by one, men or women stop, look at the flyleaf, trying to decide if it's their kind of book, smile and walk away, before turning and deciding to buy it anyway. A man stops, looking utterly dumbstruck, before coming over to the table. An Englishman, it turns out that Labyrinth was one of his mother's favourite novels and he can't quite believe the author is sitting in front of him at CostCo in SF on a Saturday in April.

Finally, the most extraordinary coincidence, when a young woman, an artist, stops. She is a designer of Tarot cards and has just finished a commissioned for the Museum of Bologna. She's already bought Sepulchre, interested in the painted cards - eight of them - at the front of the book, but buys another.

Inspired by medieval imagery, Anissa Morello works to commission and paints individual decks of cards for both herself and for others, and we talk about the coincidence and the serendipity that has brought both of this, to this one spot, in a shopping mall on this busy Saturday afternoon. Later, I visit her website - unicavita.com - and admire her beautiful work and reflect upon the fact that if, as a novelist, I wrote so many moments of chance, of coincidence, of split second, what-if, timings into my novels, my readers would through up their hands in disbelief. As always, life is stranger than art ....

A bientôt.

Kate

Friday 4th April

Minneapolis is a city I first visited 10 years ago, when I was Executive Director of the Chichester Festival Theatre(CFT)in West Sussex, England. Built in the early 60s, for Olivier, while he waited for his new home on the South Bank in London to be ready, CFT is the twin of the magnificent Tyrone Guthrie Theater in the Twin Cities. At the end of the 90s, things were tough in British provincial theatres, and I came over to Minneapolis to see what we, in the UK, might learn from our theatrical brothers and sisters Stateside. I fell in love with the place, with the amazing Christmas lights all around the houses, with the iconic production of A Christmas Carol, and went back to England with thoughts of how we in Sussex might transform the fortunes of the Guthrie's twin sister.

Today, in between visiting branches of Borders and Barnes & Noble to sign stock, thanks to my fabulous book escort Tim, I was finally able to see in person the new Guthrie building, beautifully blue and sleak, with a magnificent and monumental black and white image of Tyrone Guthrie himself outside. Years of waiting, fundraising, dreaming finally come to fruition.

It made me think, again, of how so much of working in the arts - in any discipline, writing, painting, theatre, sculpture, dance - is about patience. About believing in something enough to wait, to work, to get it right. Too often new writers are encouraged to look to the market, to think (guess) about what readers might want, rather than focus on the heart of the book itself. Fashions change, publishing is fickle, so the best an author can do is to write what they want to write, with passion and with integrity, and to the best of their ability. Then, when the time comes to put the novel out there, cross your fingers and hope for the best. All creative work is about taking risks. If a writer has not enjoyed writing a book, then as sure as eggs are eggs, a reader won't enjoying reading it!

Perhaps thanks to this older connection I feel with the city, the evening reading and signing event in Edina was especially enjoyable. In the audience, students of creative writing, people with a connection with the southwest of France of Sepulchre, a woman who had first heard of my previous novel, Labyrinth, thanks to a recommendation from a tour guide in France. A string of coincidences, connections and chances. Even a mother and son from another region of France, just passing by. An evening of new friends and old acquaintances. And the sun was shining!

Tomorrow, a new time zone - appropriate for an author of time slip novels - and plenty of time to read when travelling from state to state.

A bientot.

Kate

Day 3 and driving into Washington this morning, with the staggeringly beautiful blossom draping the trees, I'm struggling now to see everything in terms of the lyrics of songs. Perfect Day, for example. Another song, America, this time by Razorlight. Or the notes of a Debussy song, La Damoiselle Elue, subtle, gentle, bringing to mind images of sunlit French gardens and a girl with stars in her hair.

The way that music connects us to different times and places, and to other people, both strangers and familiars - is one of the themes of Sepulchre. My modern heroine, an American writer in Europe on a research trip, Meredith Martin, carries with her always a piece of piano music. Only the date - 1891 - and the title at the top of the first sheet give any indication as to its origins. Tucked inside the envelope, too, are a couple of old black and white photographs. But the notes on the stave of music carry her - and hopefully readers too - to places beyond the reaches of her knowledge, her imagination, her experience. Meredith is researching the life of the French composer Claude Debussy, but also looking for clues to her own family background. Woven into Meredith's journey from Paris to the south west of France, is the idea that the music itself contains information, clues, if only she had the ear to hear it. As the Eliot wrote, 'music heard, yet not heard.' Within Sepulchre, the power of the music is precisely that it speaks beyond language, beyond time and beyond place, until finally the story is told.

As it is for my imaginary characters in Sepulchre, the quick and the dead, the living and the ghosts, so it was for me this morning. Driving into Washington, listening to music that reminded me of other visits here, each experience becoming layered one upon the other with a unique soundtrack playing in the background.

What about you?

A bientôt

Kate

Day 2, and I've spent the morning touring the whole of the US by radio - from West Virginia to Florida, Milwaukee to Detroit - from my hotel room in New York. In a matter of hours, though, I'm off in person to the first live event of the Sepulchre tour, a reading and talk in the Hingham Public Library organised by Buttonwood Books.

I'm staying in the same hotel in Boston I stayed on my tour for Labyrinth last year, when I was still writing Sepulchre, so it feels a great way to remind myself that all that hard work paid off!

The questions an author is asked - by readers at a live event, or by radio broadcasters or by literary reviewers - is a great way of getting a sense of your own book and writing. This is why I enjoy touring so much (that, and the room service of course ....)

It's easy for an author, when focusing on getting everything in place in a novel, to lose sight of the bigger picture. Sepulchre is part traditional ghost story (nothing too ghastly!), part Tarot tale, all mixed up with a mystery tied in to the 19th century history of America and France. It was great fun to write but, boy, was it complicated too! Only now, after the dust of writing has settled and the ink is dry, can I start to really look at the novel with objective eyes.

But readers see the book as it really is straight away. They react - hopefully with excitement, with enthusiasm, sometimes with helpful criticism - with innocent eyes and thoughts. As a result, I feel I learn as much about my own work from readers' responses as I do from my own analysis of my writing. And that's the way to move forward, to enjoy each book for its own merits. Listen and learn, listen and learn ...

Tonight, in the Hingham Public Library (66 Leavitt St, Hingham MA), this process of learning and sharing the years of work on Sepulchre will begin in earnest. And, the more of you who read the book and let me know what you think - either in person during the tour, or via this website - the happier I'll be.

So, ahead of tonight, a huge thank you to Buttonwood Books for organising tonight's event. Boston here I come ....

A bientôt

Kate

It's 8 o'clock in New York and I'm sitting in the hotel restaurant, a little jet lagged. Before me, bright in crimson and green, is an advertisement for Sepulchre on the front page of the Arts Section of the NY Times. A fantastic surprise.

Like all novelists, I take a sneaky peak around at all the people on the surrounding tables: fathers and daughters; tourists discussing which museum to visit today, spreading maps over the white table linen; businessmen with suits slung casually over the back of chairs. I'm a little shell shocked - 18 hours of travelling will do that to a girl - but feeling ready to go. Today, interviews and meeting with my publisher and agent, before the real work starts tomorrow.

The wonderful thing about being a writer as your day job - what am I saying, one of the many wonderful things - is that you get to travel to places you've met only before in your imagination or in the lines of favourites books, or songs. So last night at midnight, as March tipped over into April, I found myself being driven in the rain over the New Jersey Turnpike, with the familiar words of Simon & Garfunkel's America on a loop in my head. When I was a child, it was one of my favourite songs, wistful, speaking of a world I knew nothing about. I didn't even know what a Turnkpike was! Years later, though, I'm there.

It's just another way in which writing links the past to the present.And in books, maybe, more than any other art form. As readers, we can be taken anywhere in the world, at any time, to places that live still on the pages of a novel. This is what I hope readers will feel with Sepulchre - that you are right there, in the haunted woods of southwest France, walking among the shadows of a long-abandoned tomb. And who knows, maybe like me with S&G, some of you one day will be able to visit the real landscape in France that inspired my imaginary landscape in Sepulchre. Let me know what you think. I love to hear from readers what you love about the book, even what you don't! A novel, any novel, is only as good as the readers it attracts. It's a partnership.

So, to work. And I'll leave you with the first lines.

'This story begins in a city of bones.'

My real life story, on the other hand, begins in a hotel on West 54th St in New York.

A bientôt.

K