The Sidehug Machine.

I have a full time job. And although by getting up at 5AM and tweeting while I walk between buildings at work and hustling I can do most things other writers do, I can’t really do book tours. The reason is that I have a limited number of vacation days and have to use some of them for conferences and speaking at churches. So if I told my kids, “We’re going to hold Christmas in February because dad is really busy this year,” they’d probably tell me, “What you talking about Willis?”

But writers with new books need to be out there. They need to be meeting people and side hugging the day away. Fortunately, Zondervan found a solution …

They created a lifesize, cardboard cartoon cut out of me sidehugging. That’s right, next week at Catalyst we’ll be debuting what I’m calling the “Sidehug 3000.”

I’d like to point out that it’s slightly shorter than me. Zondervan called me and said, “Whoops, we made it a little shorter than you by mistake.” Of the mistakes they could have made, I would have preferred, “We made it too tall,” or “We made it too muscular” or “We made it way too handsome.” But no, we landed on shorter. Awesome.

So it’s kind of like there’s a 92% scale version of me out there. And although the woman in this photo looks a little terrified, I assure you, it is a delightful experience. And soon we’ll be giving a few away to readers and sending them on adventures that may or may not involve Hardy Boys like mysteries.

What should we call this thing? What would you name it?