The rain continued the next day as Wendy Sheanin and I headed to the airport. When we arrived at SFO, though, we found out our flight was delayed. There was a chance we’d miss our dinner, which was scheduled for that same evening.

At the Virgin America counter, the agent said we couldn’t switch to an earlier flight, and also mentioned that the flight was delayed even longer than we thought. Cue suspenseful music: Would Samuel and Wendy (doesn’t that sound like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale?) make it to their pre-pub dinner? Then, something quite amazing happened. Wendy let the agent know how important it was for us to get to Los Angeles, and the agent melted. Like ice cubes under a heat lamp. A few strokes of the keyboard later, we were stand-by in an earlier flight.

We traveled to Los Angeles under purple lights and the sound of a young Australian woman’s accent on the PA system. Hours later, at Il Piccolino in West Hollywood (photo above of the entrance), our group sat at a table in the middle of the restaurant, next to a group of diners speaking Russian, and across from some young movie actors. I met Jen Ramos, of Vroman’s/Book Soup, Paige Garver of Book Soup, Mary Williams of Skylight, Alison Reid of Diesel, and John Evans, also of Diesel. Not long after we sat down, a series of appetizers began to appear, one surprise after another.

It was great to do the tour stop in Los Angeles, as I went to graduate school there, and was familiar with (and had been to) many of the stores. Though I no longer have a place in L.A., I still think of it as my home, and never more so than when I navigate the winding exits and ramps of the freeways, especially the 10 and the 405.

The dinner lasted for four hours, and had a very familial feeling to it, since everyone seemed to know or have worked with one another. I got to learn a tremendous amount about the quirks and pleasures of owning a bookstore–emptying boxes in the morning, meeting a celebrity for a reading in the evening, as one bookseller noted.

At the end of the meal, we all gathered at the valet to get our cars. I was very lucky to get to do a pre-pub tour; very few debut authors have that opportunity, I was told. Getting back to my sister’s, I felt pretty good about the whole evening. Unlike Cinderella, I hadn’t left a slipper behind, and I’d actually gotten to dance with the Prince for a few nice waltzes.

Back in January, my editor Kerri Kolen phoned me one morning to tell me that Simon & Schuster would be sending me out on a pre-pub tour in March. They wanted to introduce me to booksellers in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

At the time, I didn’t know what a pre-pub tour was; I knew of course, about regular author tours, having gone to my share of readings. But apparently pre-pub tours gave authors a chance to meet with bookstore managers and owners, in the hopes of stirring good buzz for a book that the publisher has high hopes for.

So two weeks ago, during a week off of teaching, I went to the Bay Area for the first in my two-city pre-pub tour. In San Francisco, I checked into the Hotel Rex, which greeted me with its 1930s artist’s studio vibe, and quotations painted on the walls from the likes of Jack London. After a quick shower and stroll around Union Square, Cheri Hickman, a sales rep for the publisher, picked me up for the dinner.

We arrived at Radius in SOMA amidst a sudden, torrential rain, and the maitre d’ directed us to the back of the restaurant, where a mini-reception was taking place. There, I met Wendy Sheanin, the Director of Marketing of Adult Fiction for Simon & Schuster, for the first time. Next to a long table (photo above), the waiters served chardonnay and clams. The atmosphere was classy but cozy; the table was set apart from the rest of the restaurant, in essentially a private room, and if you looked in only one direction, you could pretend you were in someone’s house in the French countryside.

At dinner, I sat between Elaine Petrocelli, of Book Passage, and Melissa Mytinger, of The Booksmith & Berkeley Arts & Letters–I ended up spending most of the evening talking to them. The young waiter, Fred, had a thick French accent, and great enthusiasm. He reminded me of that Henri Cartier Bresson photograph of the boy smiling proudly as he carries two bottle of wine. He would’ve been someone like Fred when he grew up.

Everyone, except for Pete Mulvihill of Green Apple and I, chose the lamb–Pete and I opted for the trout. (We were also the only ones to choose the float for dessert later on; surely that counts as meeting cute?) When the lamb–sumptuous, served on a skillet–arrived, I realized I’d made a mistake. At that point, Elaine Petrocelli discreetly cut up a small slice of her lamb and placed it on my appetizer plate.

I also got to meet Calvin Crosby, of Books, Inc., Jessica Heywood of A Great, Good Place for Books, and Michael Barnard of Rakestraw. The dinner, to my surprise, lasted three hours, though it felt like much less. As we left the restaurant, the owner asked me how I’d enjoyed myself, and I said I’d enjoyed myself very much.

ARCs for THIS BURNS MY HEART arrived this week, and I welcomed them with a pleasure near physical in its intensity. Pronounced “arcs”–as in Noah’s ark, or character arc–they’re sent to booksellers, reviewers, and the all-important “big mouth” folks to build buzz. They’re similar, in my mind, to the film festival circuit that some films often travel in before opening in theaters. In our Age of Information, news travel fast about the merits of a book.

Before I got my ARCs in the mail, I feared disappointment. What if they weren’t nice? What if they were printed in glossy thick paper (a particular pet peeve of mine)? What if they didn’t live up to the Platonic ideal of an ARC swimming in my head? Expert at managing expectations, I’m always waiting for a letdown–but the ARC looked great.

It had–to my delight, and this seemed to matter most of all–a pulpy cover that felt substantial and good to the touch. It had–to my surprise–my picture on the back–making it look very much like a finished book. It had an attractive cover image–which I’d seen before–as well as a striking spine and back–which I hadn’t seen before.

My ARC came out after the interiors had been designed, so it looks very finished. It resembles a trade paperback that got very tall. It felt good to touch it, and feel its weight on my hands.

The ARC reminded me of why I love physical books: the feel of the soft paper against your fingers, the noise the pages make as you turn them, the ability to flip through it and get a sense of its wholeness.

This week I had dinner with booksellers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and, in a self-reflexive gesture, my mind referenced time and again one of my favorite films, 84 Charing Cross Road. Starring Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft, it’s a gem of a film–a love story where the principals never meet, a love affair based entirely on the life of the mind. Hopkins plays Frank, a married British bookstore owner in the period of reconstruction after World War II, when food rations and scarcity of goods still affected the nation. Bancroft is the American writer Helen Hanff–the film is based on her memoirs–who requests some rare titles from Hopkins, initiating a life-long correspondence and friendship.

The film’s pleasures lie in its subtlety–Helen’s singleness (or old maidenness) is never remarked upon, and as the decades pass, neither acknowledge their growing love and admiration for one another. It is a love story where the love is as much for books as it is for each other. The film gets a number of things right–the excitement of opening a newly arrived shipment of books, the intense personal investment both characters share in the bookseller-customer relationship, Hanff’s look of wonderment when she finally arrives at the bookshop, at the end of the movie.

In one of my favorite scenes, Helen sends Frank and his employees a care package including dried goods and canned ham. The employees marvel at it, in utter delight, and we watch as they share the food with their own families. That moment encapsulates the fine balancing act between the two countries–America may be the superpower possessing material wealth and industrialized goods, but war-torn Britain is still the land of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Woolf. Helen may not be well-off–the pre-war New York studio she lives in is tiny and her income as a TV writer sporadic–but she has a prototypically American can-do attitude and is rich in kindness and generosity of spirit.

As I mentioned before, Frank and Helen never meet–Frank dies–but at the end of the film, when Helen is at last able to afford to come to England, she gets to meet Frank’s widow, played by Judi Dench, who tells her, in a devastatingly beautiful speech, the depth of the connection Frank felt for Helen. At that point, the viewer understands the poignancy of their relationship–the intense affinity and kinship that can be found by two people who connect over the quixotic defense of literature; the ways in which sharing books can be an oddly intimate experience, like sharing a soul; and finally, the unspoken eroticism of bonding over a great book, as ecstatic as sharing an entire religion with only one other person.

Other bookseller movies I love include the very underrated The Love Letter, starring Kate Capshaw and based on the Cathleen Schine novel, and Notting Hill, where Hugh Grant plays a charming bookstore owner who falls in love with movie star Julia Roberts. The opening scene is about how hard it is to get people to come to readings, and though it was cut from the finished film, it can be found in the original script. (Essentially, Grant has to literarily bribe people to come to a reading at his store–it’s very funny.)

I have a feeling I know why booksellers make good movie heroes and heroines–probably the same reason loan sharks and hedge fund managers make such good villains.

Jane Austen’s talents as a social satirist and as an anthropologist of manners place her comfortably on the large scale canvas of the 18th British novel; yet, her skills as a miniaturist, as a portraitist of small, individual transactions, hint at the paradox at the heart of her genius. Austen takes the carnivalesque, more unwieldy impulses of the genre, containing a multitude of intersecting characters, of varying moral fiber, their intentions at cross-purposes, while still providing exquisitely drawn individual scenes, one after another, probably hundreds of them.

The popular belief is that short story writers write the most economically, using Flaubert’s principle of the mot juste, while novelists spill out extravagant, wasteful prose, using up whole paragraphs to the short story writer’s sentence. But Austen, while not exactly thrifty in her use of language, manages to compress entire worlds within a single memorable scene. She is a dramatist of the highest order, wielding not just phenomenally incisive dialogue, but setting up brilliantly imagined encounters amongst unexpected parties. Her genius can be found by looking at her scene by scene, in examining her creation of one bravura moment after another.

These are only a few of her by-now iconic scenes in her masterpiece Pride and Prejudice:

–The opening: Mrs. Bennett’s discovery of Bingley’s arrival in town and her demanding that her husband go pay them a visit, only to learn her husband already has

–Elizabeth Bennett’s unexpected arrival in the Bingley estate to check in on her sick sister Jane, her dress full of mud

–Obsequious cousin Mr. Collins’ initial visit and wondrously awkward dinner with the Bennett family

–Charlotte Lucas’ protestations to Elizabeth that she is not like her friend, and therefore willing to marry for money

–Elizabeth overhearing Darcy tell Bingley that there is no one at the ball pretty enough to tempt him

And that is just in the first few sections of the novel. Practically every scene in the novel brims with significance and meaning. There are no throwaway scenes in Austen. Just because her works are 400-page plus (as opposed to a ten page short story), it doesn’t mean that you only run into a great scene every dozen pages, and that the rest is filler. No, pretty much every single scene could be, say, neatly staged, acted out in real time, and it would keep the viewer’s attention (which is partly why film adaptations of her works are so successful).

But what makes each of her scenes so iconic? Partly, it is the philosophical complexity and the depth of vision in each of them. In Pride and Prejudice, for instance, much is made of Elizabeth’s impromptu sojourn into Darcy’s estate, Pemberley. In a lesser writer’s hands, the sequence would merely move the plot forward: Elizabeth goes to the estate of the man she loves, thinking that he is not there, but he makes a surprise appearance, allowing the two to reconnect.

Austen takes this potentially obligatory scene and turns it into a fascinating meditation of loss and the merciless aftermath of a wrong choice. At Pemberley, looking at the beautiful surroundings associated with its owner Darcy, Elizabeth finally understands the consequences of her disastrous earlier rejection. Pemberley’s gorgeously manicured lawns, its kindly but competent servants, and the tastefully chosen statues and art pieces on display all speak to the life that she, unwittingly, gave up. In a novel deeply preoccupied with class, and the privileges associated with it, Elizabeth comes to realize that material objects can serve as the physical manifestation of a person’s inner values–good judgment, discipline, and self-respect–his character. Austen brilliantly renders Elizabeth’s realization by setting a process usually connected with psychology and interiority against the vastness of the physical world.

Austen may seem like an unlikely source for a novel set in Korea in the 1960s, but it was one of my key inspirations. The tone of my novel is not Austen-like at all; mine is no comedy of manners. But the secret desperation of Austen’s heroines greatly influenced me; the high stakes in marriage, and how it may either lead to great happiness, or potentially disaster. Spirited, lively, and willful, Austen’s heroines lead emotionally dangerous lives; it helps, too, that Austen places them in one brilliant scene after another.

Hanbok is the traditional Korean costume, worn by both Koreans and diasporic Korean-Americans at weddings and celebrations. Many people mistake them for Japanese kimonos, but they are very different, especially at the bottom. Kimonos are held tightly, funneling narrowly at the legs, and limiting the wearer’s movement. Hanboks on the other hand are open at the bottom, resembling wide-funneled Regency dresses. They are not constrictive in shape, and allow for freedom of movement. They speak, in a way, to the paradoxical situation of women in traditional Korea. While they lived fairly circumscribed lives, Korean women also enjoyed certain symbolic and literal freedoms–symbolic in terms of being able to keep their maiden names (Korean women do not take their husbands’ names), and literal in being afforded a freedom of physical movement not often allowed in other nations abiding to Confucian beliefs.

Hanboks are very colorful, and it’s what women traditionally wore–at home and outside. They’re made up of a short, narrow jacket tied down tightly at the breasts, and a long, wide skirt, usually of a different color. Color was an important part of a hanbok’s selection, informing others not only of the wearer’s taste, but also her social situation, marital status, and wealth. Made of silk and ramie, hanboks are structured and built in such a brilliant architectural way as to prevent the fabric from sitting dully over the wearer’s body. Ideally, the skirt part of the hanbok floats slightly above the body, creating the feeling of lightness and elegance.

Nowadays, hanboks are relegated to wedding celebrations, and reserved to the older members of the wedding party, like the mothers and grandmothers of the couple. But like Indian saris and Japanese kimonos, they immediately transport both the wearers and the viewers to a distant, intriguing past.

(Photo of the film Hwang Jin Yi, about a courtesan who falls in love with a male servant.)