Reading Nights on Tour

Ternary Dreams has been out for two days and I am learning, in real time, what a reading actually requires of a book: not the sentence that looked strongest on the page, but the one that survives being said out loud to a room of people who can hear you second-guess a word choice as it happens.

The venues have been small, which I like more than I expected to. A stool, a stand mic, a lamp instead of stage lighting, and rows of people I mostly cannot see past the first two because of how the light falls. I read the Setun chapter most nights, the one about Shkabara, because it is the one I most want to be sure the room actually hears.

Afterward someone usually asks how long the ternary logic research took, and someone else usually asks about my mother, and I answer both honestly, in whatever order the questions arrive. This is the part of publishing nobody warns you is the good part.