Autumn in Review - September

Time to wake up this blog! I just sat up and realized it's Thanksgiving - well no, that's already passed. I think I'll start with a quick review of what's been happening this year. Out of order and higgledy-piggledy, but here goes. Let's start with September...

On one weekend,  I took a Sunday hike with kids up to Lake Isabelle in the Brainard Lake Recreation Area.  Our terrible drought here in Colorado was made visible when we arrived at the lake.  Not fire damage, thank goodness, but just dry.  Most of the lake just wasn’t there.  Here’s what we saw on a glorious autumn day.  Note the barren strip around the current water line -a beach where there shouldn't be one.   Here’s a view of the same lake in a greener year.  We did have a good time stomping on the wooden bridges along our hike to make sure no trolls came up to grab us.  None did.  Whew!

 


The Colorado Gold Writers Conference, sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers is always a September highlight. The workshops are great, but I find myself sitting for a great deal of the conference hours in the large, open, and most welcoming bar/lobby of the Denver Renaissance hotel. It’s a great time and place to catch up with writer-friends from all over the region, as well as meet new ones. I gave a morning Master class on characterization, as well as a workshop on writing first person. I also did an hour's discussion with authors Warren Hammond and Mackay Wood on violence in fiction – why an author may choose to use it, and what we considered our own boundaries and favorite techniques for writing violent scenes. I also had to give a kick-off speech, seeing as how the members of RMFW had voted me in as their 2012 Writer of the Year. It is a great honor, and I was treated royally.

What I Was Working On: workshops for Colorado Gold, proof pages for The Daemon Prism mass market, the New Boo, the Obama campaign

What We Were Watching: Merlin, Mad Men, Bronco football

More about the New Book soon.  Watch for The Next Big Thing.