Meanwhile, my geocaching enthusiast brother, David, planted Juan TB33P02 in College Woods Cache, which is in Connecticut.

So the breakdown thusfar of where these Juans are:

Juan TB33NWZ started in Port Townsend, WA and is now outside Asheville, NC.

Juan TB33NX9 started in Port Townsend, WA and is now outside Chico, CA.

Juan TB33NX8 started in Seattle, WA and is now 28 miles east of its original location.

Juan TB33P02 started in New Haven, CT and is still there.

Juan TB33P00 was dropped yesterday in Plainfield, VT.

By the way, I activated another story this weekend and put it in the hands of my brother from Connecticut, who promises to plant it someplace on the east coast. Stay tuned.

Rubberpaws had this to say about Juan on Juan’s log: “picked this one up and later read it to a few geocaching friends, we all thought it was kinda of stupid, with a total predicable ending, was it suppose to be funny?”

This got me wondering whether how the perceived quality of these stories will affect how diligently geocachers move them along. I wonder if someone who loves one of the Found and Lost stories is more likely to pick it up and pass it along. Will liking the stories influence how much geocachers want to share them? I suppose what I’m considering here is a physical manifestation of word-of-mouth. That said, even though rubberpaws found the story lacking, she (I’m assuming, based on rubberpaw’s profile gallery) still kindly planted it for the next geocacher to discover.

This weekend I also got an email from Nazanne, the geocacher who moved Juan TB33NWZ from coastal Washington state to North Carolina. Here’s what Nazanne had to say:

“I had a great time back in North Carolina. I had time to do some caching and it was really fun to explore some territory that is very different from here. I’m a little concerned that particular cache doesn’t get a lot of traffic so I hesitated before dropping it but I wanted to be sure I didn’t bring it back to WA. Hopefully it won’t sit there too long. I needed a container large enough to hold Juan and it seemed like I was finding mostly micros.

The funny thing was that the day I picked up Juan I had told myself I wasn’t going to pick up any TBs because I wasn’t sure how long it was going to be before I could place them. But I also was in a situation where I was going to have to be sitting and waiting and a story was just what I needed so I picked it up.“

This is exactly what so excites me about this project. The idea that someone can stumble upon a story where they least expect it and spend a couple minutes reading it while sitting on a log. This makes me fantastically happy.

So let’s recap how this works. When Juan TB33NX9 is retrieved from Zed’s Find I’ll get an email alert (given that the geocacher logs their possession of the story on geocaching.com). But here’s the cool thing–Barry can sign up to be alerted as well. So we’ll both be notified that somebody new possesses the story, and when that new person drops the story off in another cache, they can choose to be apprised of its whereabouts as well. Each person who reads this particular copy of this story will form a community of sorts, a series of readers stretching forward through time, all of us kept in the loop as the story travels around the world. And we’ll all be able to look at a nifty map showing where the story has traveled.

It dawned on me tonight as I drove home from teaching a short story class that I’m going to meet a lot of people through this project. Some I’ll just know by their handles, others may become friends, who knows. I’m certain very few of them will be able to fit five or six ping pong balls in their mouths. As the Found and Lost project becomes a full-blown series, the proliferation of characters in the stories will be mirrored by the proliferation of the characters who come across the stories in the real world. Maybe I’ll be inspired to turn some of them into characters in the stories themselves. Hmm…

Thanks again, Barry!

Think about how stories typically circulate in the world. I write a story, send it to a literary journal, it gets published, and maybe one or two people emails me to mention they read it. One of the perplexing questions I get asked a lot is “How is your book doing?” (Rebecca Brown has a perfect retort for this. She says, “Great! It’s finished!”) I’m never quite sure how to answer this question. I haven’t seen sales figures for either of my books recently, I have no idea who the people are who read them unless they contact me, and I have no idea where in the world individual copies end up. With Found and Lost, I can see where each individual story is and where it has been and who has touched it. I can read comments from that person about the story and what they were doing the day they found it. I can see photos that the person has uploaded, and I get an email alerting me whenever the story has been placed in a new cache or is picked up by someone new. I can send each person a personal email if I wish. And if they seem to enjoy my work, I can let them know about new stuff coming out.

Haruki Murakami wrote that “I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person but with an unspecified number of readers.” Until now that relationship had to be conducted through a sort of firewall of anonymity. For readers, it meant that writers existed on some mysterious, exalted plane, glimpsed occasionally at public readings or in the pages of a magazine. For writers, it meant readers existed within a kind of cloud. If you’re a writer who treasures privacy and distance from readers, this era can be a little terrifying. But if you’re a writer intrigued by the writing process as direct, one-to-one communication with another intelligence, it’s a fascinating time to be alive. It’s incredibly gratifying to learn about actual people reading my work, incorporating it for a brief moment into the textures of their lives. When asked how my books are doing, it’s this ineffable experience I think about.

Another geocacher named Snoogans alerted me to something called GeoWoodstock 8, a convention to be held July 3 in Carnation, WA. Sounds very cool.

Here’s what it looked like on my walk.

Big thanks to Brian McGuigan. He’s doing an amazing job at the House, with the Hugo blog and with his legendary Cheap Wine and Poetry and Cheap Beer and Prose readings. When was the last time you heard about people being turned away at the door for a literary reading? Yeah, they’re that amazing.