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This year's book tour for Another Man's Moccasins is the largest with thirty-four towns and cities, and I thought I'd address a question that's asked a lot-"Isn't it horrible doing those extended book tours?" Yep, it is. It's really tough to go jetting across the country, mostly on the publisher's dime. Viking/Penguin has these people called escorts who pick you up at the airport and whisk you away to your a) Hotel, b) Restaurant, c) Asian Massage Parlor or anywhere else you might want to go. They call me Mr. Johnson, and I keep looking around for my dad.

It's really depressing to walk into bookstores all over the country and see piles of your books sitting there on the A tables at the door or with little signs under them that say STAFF PICK--it's so debasing.

I like talking to people, which drives my wife up a wall. Maybe it's a by-product of living on a ranch where the closest town has only 25 people and by spring they're all tired of talking to me, or that I live in a place where people still wave at you on the road-personally I'm not so sure it's friendliness or just sheer surprise that there's somebody else out there. But I like talking to people, which is a problem, because then the lines start moving slowly, and I get yelled at by my wife and the book store owners, because I'm being forced to deal with intelligent, insightful people who want to speak with me about one of the great passions of my life.

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The working life of most writers is pretty unstructured. Mine especially. I don't teach (so far) and I don't write short fiction or essays or magazine articles (so far). I write novels with long deadlines. So I've spent a long time trying to figure out how to shape my days--what kind of daily goal will cause me to write well instead of badly and what unit of writing will best quantify my progress. (I have to admit that on many days I am happy not to quantify anything at all, but rather to fritter away the hours knowing that I will begin my book later.)

I started with pages. I set myself a goal to write seven pages a day. The problem with goals is that you orient yourself to them. I got so taken by the idea of cranking out the pages, I would use big spaces between scenes. I'd celebrate finishing a page by going off and doing something else. When I'd lose myself in thought I'd realize I wasn't writing any pages and jostle myself back into action. This was a problem. Thinking, it turns out, is important to writing. Pages are a necessary feature of books, of course, but it's better if the words on them are good.

I thought I'd be tricky and writerly and switch from pages to words. I set myself the goal of writing two thousand words a day and would fiercely resist the desire to translate that into pages. (It's eight pages.) I would sit there typing away, devilishly padding sentences with extra thats and looking down at the word count every few seconds. I would write five hundred words and spring from my computer to go do something else. My sentences were flabby and I was hanging around on the surface of my story.