Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 6 September 2004

Remember the scene in "Bruce Almighty" where he's answering everyone's prayers via email and he can't possibly keep up with the flow, so he just starts saying "YES!" to everyone?

That's the closest description I can come up with for my life in the past 24 hours. I've answered emails for about 12 hours out of the past 24, averaging a response every 30-40 seconds. Yes, that means I skim the content very quickly, look for a hook or question to respond to, hit REPLY, type in the one or two sentences that personalize it, then I paste the standard bit about "thanks," "enjoy the book and site" and my name. I tried to type some new each time for the first couple of hours, but my hands started shaking after a while and the numbers in my email box grew faster than I could answer and delete them. So I had to start cheating somewhat by prepackaging much of the response.

Getting emails on broadcast is very different than getting them on Esquire articles. There I got a lot of hate mail (about 50% I would say), but here it's maybe one of every 40 emails, so much nicer.

Do I wish I could spend the time to respond to all like I usually do? Yes, but I know people value the speed of response more than the content when they feel so motivated as to send something off immediately upon seeing you on TV, so I try to meet that expectation, sacrificing the content somewhat.

Plus, frankly, I just can't stand having unread email in my accounts. Bugs the hell out of me. Plus, I just can't stand not replying immediately if someone goes to the effort to send something to me. Many write that this is the first time they've ever sent an email like this, so you want to be as responsive as possible.

Still, it all becomes a blur with that sort of volume. Not that I'm complaining, but the time I've spent on this gets stressful with the family, who wonder why I feel the need to stay chained to the PC all day on a beautiful Labor Day weekend Sunday.

I've saved a bunch of the nicest ones, and would love to post them, but that's probably too self-congratulatory (something I got an email about!).

Anyway, besides all the responses I sent out, I want to thank everyone again generally for the flood of emails. Very thrilling to receive and read, despite the crush. Things like that are fairly rare in life, so you try to enjoy the fact that you've managed to touch people enough to move them to such efforts.

To my surprise, PNM is still #3 on Amazon this morning. My wife said, "Maybe they don't update the list on holidays." Hmm. Here's hoping she's wrong.

Dropped back down to 8 on B&N, but hard to complain about being in the single digits again on Amazon and for the first time on B&N.

In fact, I'm hoping people are buying the book mostly online this time, for I fear the numbers won't be on the shelves in many bookstores at this "late" date. Remember, the book came out in April and the competition is crushing this year on political books.

Anyway, no news stories to blog today. Burned up all my PC time on the emails. Kids are getting restless.