Do One Nice Thing For Yourself Today!
Advice from a book tour....
A very wise editor and friend gave me a little bit of advice before I set out on my book tour for You Were Always Mine last week.
Do one nice thing for yourself a day while you’re on the road.
Simple. Yet, transformative.
It is so easy for us to lose track of caring for ourselves while traveling for work. Back when I was a travel editor I was out and about for about 40 weeks a year and while it was magical and life-changing (and I met my husband on a boat in the Galapagos) I was still run-down and exhausted a lot of the time because I didn’t take care of myself. So when Christine and I set out this week on our national tour we vowed to one another to do one nice thing for ourselves every day. AND WE DID IT. Actually we did a few nice things a day. We made sure we weren’t just on a book tour. We were also on an adventure where we connected with friends and readers and ate things we liked. I’m writing this on the plane home now and I don’t feel nearly as exhausted as I should. I feel good. I don’t exactly feel like I took a vacation, but I feel invigorated and happy about the past ten days.
Book tours can be hard. You’re always worried about whether people will show up and if they don’t you worry that the book was terrible instead of thinking maybe no one wanted to go out in bad weather. I’m lucky that I get to travel with my writing partner Christine and that we can talk one another down when the other gets angsty. I’m also lucky to have someone to push and to push me to actually enjoy each and every day.
Here’s what I did:
