In her last posts, Ani­ta Dia­mant wrote about the cov­er of her newest nov­el Day After Night and about where she gets her ideas from.

I will be on the road a fair amount this fall, intro­duc­ing my new nov­el, Day After Night, to the read­ing pub­lic. (Check out www​.ani​ta​dia​mant​.com for where and when.) I’m not look­ing for­ward to it.

But fear not. This is not anoth­er ungrate­ful rant about the drudgery of the com­mer­cial jour­ney. I heard a writer once call book tour fatigue a ​“first-world” prob­lem –- on the order of too many choic­es in the gro­cery store. Believe me, I am pro­found­ly grate­ful for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet read­ers, which is the best part of a book tour. Actu­al­ly, it’s pret­ty much the only good part.

The prob­lem is that I am always a very reluc­tant trav­el­er. I head for the air­port fight­ing the grav­i­ta­tion­al pull of my own home. On the eve of any trip –- a day in New York, a week in Jerusalem, it makes no dif­fer­ence — I am already long­ing for the con­so­la­tion of my return. My husband’s unthink­ing dai­ly kind­ness breaks my heart. I get melan­choly mov­ing laun­dry from the wash­er to the dryer.

It is unfash­ion­able to dis­like trav­el­ing. So many peo­ple I know love to trav­el, live to trav­el, that it seems like a weak­ness or even a moral fail­ing not to embrace the adven­ture of dis­tant places. Does this mean that I lack curios­i­ty? Or maybe I’m just a wimp. My daugh­ter has already lived on three con­ti­nents and she is only 23 years old.

Peo­ple assure me that my aver­sion to trav­el is due to with work­ing trips, which inevitably lead from air­port to hotel to book­store or syn­a­gogue or lec­ture hall, then back to hotel and air­port again. Min­neapo­lis, Cleve­land, and many parts of New Jer­sey are all a cor­po­rate blur.

But the truth is, vaca­tions make me anx­ious on their own terms. I get over­whelmed with choic­es: where to look, what not to miss. The essen­tial expe­ri­ence or unbeat­en track? A con­ver­sa­tion with natives or anoth­er muse­um? The muse­um is eas­i­er and you get to check it off the uni­ver­sal trav­el to-do list. Which leads peo­ple to utter sen­tences such as, ​“We did London.”

My favorite trav­el expe­ri­ences have been utter­ly ran­dom; the wine tast­ing I attend­ed with a cou­ple of med­ical stu­dents (com­plete strangers) in Tel Aviv a few years ago; the con­ver­sa­tion – in French – with a man from Naples as we sat at a fam­i­ly-style restau­rant in Flo­rence; the Israeli restau­ra­teur in Cos­ta Rica, who served us the best meal we ate all week.

You don’t plan stuff like that; it just hap­pens. I just need to scrape up the hope to believe that expe­ri­ences like that are pos­si­ble wher­ev­er I go — includ­ing stops along a book tour.

Ani­ta Diamant’s newest book, Day After Night, is now avail­able. Vis­it www​.ani​ta​dia​mant​.com, her offi­cial website.