The Long Way Home

For fifteen years, home has mostly been a place I visit at three in the morning, usually with a Chiefs game streaming on my TV from DAZN while the rest of Funabashi sleeps. This September, for one week, it stops being a memory I stream at odd hours. I am going back.

I have written two novels and most of a third from my house in Japan. I have done exactly one in-person signing in my life, and it was in a small English-language bookshop in Tokyo. It was a lovely afternoon, and I wrote about it here if you missed it. But there is a specific thing I have never done, and it has quietly bothered me for years. I have never signed a book in the country I am from, in the corner of it where I actually grew up.

I am from Excelsior Springs, Missouri, a short drive north of Kansas City. When people ask where home is, that is the honest answer I give, even after living in Seattle, owning a home in Los Angeles and more than a decade and a half of living on the other side of the planet. And if there is one thread that has kept me tied to it across all those miles, it is the Chiefs. I have written before about what it is like to be a Chiefs fan in Japan, screaming silent screams at a screen at an hour when no one you know is awake to scream with you. It is a strange kind of loyalty. It is also, some weeks, the closest thing to home I can reach from here.

So the trip matters. I land in Missouri in late September and I am there for about a week. Just in time to sit in the stands for a Chiefs game instead of watching one alone at dawn. Long enough to see friends and family. I am also lining up a chance to talk with students at my old high school in Excelsior Springs while I am in town, though we are still working out the date on that one. And then, on the Friday, the reason I am writing this post at all.

The Signing

On Friday, September 25, I will be at Basement Books KC in Liberty, Missouri, from one in the afternoon until four, sitting behind a table with a pen and a stack of my own books. It is free. There is no RSVP and no ticket. You can simply walk in. As fate would have it, that is the weekend of the Liberty Fall Festival so I imagine it will be quite busy.

Both novels will be there for anyone who wants a signed copy. Sheffield, the science fiction one, and Tatwitt, the dark fantasy one. But please understand that selling books is not really the point of the day for me. The point is that after fifteen years of doing this at a distance, mailing manuscripts across an ocean and watching reviews come in from a time zone where it is still yesterday, I get to sit in a room in my home state and hand a book to someone in person. That is not a thing I have ever gotten to do here. I have thought about it more than I would like to admit.

More Than a Signing

There is also a reason the timing feels right, beyond the Chiefs schedule and a gap in my teaching calendar. My third novel, The Emotion Engine, is due out in November. This trip lands squarely on the road to that release, which makes the signing feel less like a one-off afternoon and more like the first public marker on the way to book three. The first time I stand somewhere and talk about all of this out loud, to people in the same room, before the new one arrives.

So here is my actual invitation. If you are anywhere near Liberty on Friday, September 25, come by. Buy a book if you want one, or do not, and just come say hello either way. Bring questions. Ask me about the Chiefs, or about writing a man who cannot feel anything, or about what it is like to build a whole alien food chain from a desk in Japan. After fifteen years of doing the far-away version of this job, getting to do the in-person version, at home, is worth more to me than I can fit neatly into a closing paragraph.

I will see you there. It has been a long time coming.

—Charles