In My Words: Kimberly Burton Allen, Writer

Starting time: 7:15 AM MST, Flagstaff, AZ Starting mileage: 59382 Yesterday's mileage: 617 Whether due to the change in time, an unusual amount of traffic noise, or just anticipation, we were up and out early this morning for our last leg of the seven-day trip. Some more history: Chris bought the Duchess sight unseen, off eBay, where it was listed through a dealer on behalf of a client. The gentleman had owned the car for 25 years. About 14 years ago, he had shipped her from his home in Northern California to his summer home in Nova Scotia, where she became the "summer driver," until the gentleman grew too old to drive and reluctantly decided to sell her. No garage, so the Duchess gets a blankie for the night Chris and he spoke for hours over the phone prior to the conclusion of the sale, and one of the funniest moments was when, at Chris's instruction, the old gentleman and his daughter, armed with an iPhone with Facetime, gave Chris a virtual test d...

Starting time: 7:45 AM CST, Amarillo, TX Starting mileage: 58744 Yesterday's mileage: 571 The mesas of Arizona These are the long days, on long, mostly straight intertates with few outposts of civilization. The hours en route are artifically shortened by the fact that we are gaining time as we head west. Amarillo was shrouded in cowshit-scented fog as we pulled out onto the westbound highway this morning before 8 AM seeking a place for breakfast and coffee. Except that we hadn't realized we were staying on the western edge of town, and within a mile we were once again on the open road with not even a truck stop in sight. Thankfully, almost as soon as we cleared the city limits the dense fog lifted, exposing unpopulated prairie as far as the eye could see, broken only occasionally by things like a small windfarm or a stockyard. I am VERY cranky when I don't have coffee and some food in the morning, so between that and the fog, the fifteen or so miles to tiny Vega, ...

Starting time: 8:40 AM CST, Topeka, KS Starting mileage: 58173 Yesterday's mileage: 325 miles MADE IT!  Now on to California!!!  I have a confession. Semi trucks give me panic attacks. Yes, Doctor Freud, I can trace this back to my younger days. I was in my first year in college, driving the second-to-fast lane on the 57 Freeway from Cal State Fullerton to my job at a restaurant in Tustin, CA on a rainy day in November. A double-trailered semi truck in the slow lane of the six-lane highway hit his brakes and they locked up, and on the slippery road he lost all traction. He careened across the six lanes of traffic, hit the cement center divider, and slid back across the freeway. His second trailer fishtailed into the front quarter panel of my 1966 Mustang GT, sending me spinning into traffic. My car stopped spinning facing north on the southbound freeway, and I said a quick prayer that all those cars heading straight at me would stop and...they did. Shaking, I drove o...

Starting time: 8:45 AM CST – St. Louis, MO Starting mileage: 57843 Yesterday’s mileage: 470 Average MPG: 15.9 MPG We stayed last night at Embassy Suites Downtown St. Louis, in a phenomenal old building that had been built in the mid 1800s as a department store, After several iterations, it was most recently a Dillard’s, which closed in the 1980s. The ceilings in our room were twelve feet high (and you really appreciated that height when you looked at the floor-to-ceiling curtains; what do you suppose was the yardage required per room...?) Complimentary happy hour and breakfast were served in what they called the Atrium which was, remarkably, NOT on the first floor, but rather on the fourth floor (of five). This is a picture of it, which fails utterly to capture the magnificence of scale. And of course, one of the attractions of the Embassy Suites was the fact that it offered valet parking for the Duchess. The head valet, who stated "There hasn't be a car in for...

Starting time: 9:00 AM, EST, Huntington, WV Starting mileage: 57368 Yesterday's mileage: 436 Yesterday's average gasoline MPG: 15.4 Chris would write this blog using the four lines above, period, no commentary.  Well. I always say that the reason I write novels as opposed to short stories is that I can't even introduce myself in 500 words. Something that differs this year from our previous trips: As we approach the end of the driving day and need to arrange accommodations for the night, Chris gets on the phone to ask the various hotels if they have secure covered parking available. This definitely separates the men from the boys, so to speak, in the hotel world. All the classic motor hotels--out. After about the third call, he's asking the clerks if they know who in town DOES have covered parking. With last night's endeavours we ended up at a Holiday Inn Suites (suites!? what a misnomer that was), but it was in a fun part of town due to Marshall Univeristy...

Starting time: 8:40 AM EST, Baltimore, MD Starting mileage: 56922 Yesterday's mileage: 282 miles Yesterday's average gas mileage: 13.2 MPG Chris and Andrew just before today's blast off Growing up, my family seldom ate out. Mom cooked dinner every night (don't get me started on that). So on a road trip to visit the extended family, it was a great treat to stop for meals in Denny's restaurants, where the paper placemats showed a map of the USA with little stars representing the chain restaurant's widespread presence. I used to use a crayon to X off the states we'd journeyed through. Fast forward to 1992, when Chris took a job in New York and we relocated. I envisaged that Denny's placemat map and thought, YEAH! Just think of all those little bitty New England states I'll be able to easily cross off my list! --Well, the joke is on me: Not only are those states not quite as little bitty as I envisaged them, but when you live on the end of ...

Starting time: 11:47 AM, EST, Southampton. Starting mileage: 56640.  I love road trips. Packed and ready to go! This dates to my childhood when our family vacations were always treks from our Southern California home back to the Midwest to visit our relatives. My mother and father, who had relocated to Southern California from Illinois and Kansas respectively, were the Western outposts of family that rarely traveled more than a few hundred miles. So every couple of years, we loaded up Dad's GMC truck with the jerry-rigged heating system into the camper shell, packed up the sleeping bags (for warmth) and munchies and prepared to set out. We always left at o'dark thirty in order to get over the Cajon Pass and through the high desert and Las Vegas before temperatures got too warm. None of us except Dad were morning people, but armed with a thermos of coffee for my parents and a box of warm freshly-made doughnuts as incentive for the rest of us, we pulled out of the drive...

Our original Duchess, East Hampton, circa 1995 A little background: In California shortly after we were married, we needed a second car. Almost as a lark, we called on a Pennysaver ad for a 1967 Jaguar 420 sedan. Jaguar built the 420 model for only two years -- 1967 and 1968 -- and of that run, only a very small percentage were built for the American (e.g., left hand drive) market. The owner had backed the car into the garage so that the first thing we saw as the garage door rolled open was the car's Rolls Royce-like grille. One look, and we were hooked. We bought the car, named her the Duchess and three years later when we relocated to the end of Long Island, we shipped her out to join us. For the first four years, we drove the Duchess during the temperate months and garaged her all winter with Chris's employers. Then Chris switched jobs and we lost the winter storage facility. Build a garage at our East Hampton house, or sell the car? Chris's vote, of course, was ...

From NPR Books : Whoops, My Dear Watson:  Anthony Horowitz, the man behind an  upcoming James Bond novel , has a few issues to sort out with Sherlock Holmes first.  Sarah Lyall reports in the New York Times  that advance reading copies of Horowitz's Sherlock novel  Moriarty  contain some not-so-subtle clues to his writing process. Notes to his copy editor have been mistakenly left in, littering the text in all-caps — including this frank assessment: "I'M NOT CHANGING THIS." Knowing how pusillanimously I've proofread the galley copies of each of my books en route to publication, I cringed at the idea of copyediting notes making it to the ARCs w hen I read NPR Books' recent bulletin. But  I laughed out loud at this last line. As a writer, whether you've been published traditionally, used the services of a professional editor, sent your ms to beta readers, been a member of a writer's group or all of the above, you've run up against this declaratio...

In the ongoing debate -- paper or ebook? -- a recent article caught my eye: Science has Great News for People Who Read Actual Books .  The gist of the article is that readers of "real" books engaged more fully with the text, had increased comprehension and could focus better on longer passages, and derived more relaxation while reading. That struck a chord. I am a multi-book-at-a-time, multi-medium reader. At any one time, I have an Audible book on my iPhone, a book on CD in the car, a tower of paper books on my bedside stand, magazines in the bathroom, and several books queued up on my Kindle for anywhere I might go that might require even five minutes of waiting (car wash, dentist, car dealership, someone else's errand). Before the Internet, the article says, people read in a linear fashion, using sensory details in order to remember where key information was by layout. I am definitely one of these readers who subconsciously remember page layout and relative percent...

Remember when we went back to grade school each fall and our first assignment was to write an essay titled "What I Did on My Summer Vacation?" Today is the first day of fall , and a lthough our vacation doesn't happen until winter,  I’ve finally got time to catch my breath and share what I did over the summer: For folks who don’t have a Kindle or prefer to hold a “real” book, I’m excited to announce that all of my novels are now available in print form. (Aren’t they pretty!) Click (actually, Ctrl+click) on any of the titles below to read more about each book, or to read a sample of it on Amazon. BLOOD EXPOSURE Psychological suspense Where blood ties run deep and often intertwine, some secrets are too destructive to reveal. When Merris Alcott begins pulling the family skeletons from the closet, she finds her search for the truth has become the catalyst that threatens to destroy her entire family. Order now: BLOOD EXPOSURE NET STALKER   Psycholo...

When our bed and breakfast guests discover that I am also a writer, they often ask when it is that I get any writing done. With a laugh, I tell them I rise every morning at 4 AM and write for an hour and a half, then take my hour-long walk before showering and beginning the preparations for breakfast.  Yeah, right. The truth is, I admit to them, that little outside of the jotting of ideas and the occasional blog happens while we're busy with A Butler's Manor . Pretty much all my writing gets done between Columbus Day and May Day. I've mentally beat myself up for this for years, until I realized something key the other day: The reason I don't write when it's like a racetrack around here isn't only because I'm too busy with my day job. It's because during our long season, I'm driving the wrong vehicle, the Extrovert SUV. And that is completely opposite the Introvert one-woman kayak I need to be in to write. Guest relations are at the heart of o...

True confession, from someone whose former career was in marketing and advertising: I am lousy at self-promotion. I know I am hardly alone: Most writers I read or follow find it difficult to put the sales hat on when their natural bent is to retreat into the wizard hat of creation. Of course, at a certain tipping point of sales and word of mouth, your name is all the self-promotion you need. But getting to that point involves marketing yourself. In my opinion, the contemporary author most successful at self-promotion is James Patterson, who back in the early years, personally paid the big bucks to run ads for his books in the New York Times Book Review , and later, even television commercials. Truly, how often had you -- have you even today -- seen a TV ad for a book? But it works for him, and according to his (admittedly self-promotional) website, he holds the Guiness record for the most New York Times bestsellers ever. Love his books or hate them, you gotta admit the man is a ma...

On a sultry September day in 1997 (yikes, was it THAT long ago??), UPS rat-tat-tat-tatted on our front door with a square fat box addressed to me. Tears brimmed as I pulled the books from the box. Here they were, my first published book, the first hardcover copies of A Butler's Life. For about a week, I carried a copy with me everywhere. Even if I wasn't showing it to someone (anyone! The clerks at the grocery check out! The bartender at our favorite restaurant! The pharmacist at CVS!), it sat on the passenger seat of my car while I ran errands. On my bedside stand while I slept. On the kitchen counter while I prepared meals. Had there been a Facebook back then, I would have probably annoyed all my friends with my "baby" pictures. Because my last three books have been released first on Kindle, I've forgotten the deliciousness of opening the mailbox to find the physical copy of my book. But two days ago, Choice was released in paperback , and I received the ...