Actually, a lot of minutes… since my last newsletter. Life. It trips me up sometimes. Okay, it has tripped me up a lot in recent memory. I am working on being more consistent. To be fair, I warned you on my blog that I'm consistently inconsistent. *wry smile*

My trip to the 20Books conference in Las Vegas was a much needed shot-in-the-@$$. I learned a bunch about the business of being a writer and it reminded me of a nickname I gained after I began to drive. Call me directionally challenged. (My family called me Wrong-Way Warford.)

Plop me down in an unfamiliar city and I have absolutely no idea

which direction north is unless the sun is up and I know what time of day it is. In the dark, in Vegas? Yeah. Even Siri was lost when my roommate and I wanted to find a Japanese noodle restaurant for dinner one evening. We followed Siri in circles. After who knows how many circles we walked, we took a break from the cold in a sweets store (see the giant gummy worm-snake above.)

Then we followed Google in wider circles. Directions from two different strangers didn’t help either. After walking more than 5,000 fruitless steps, we ate dinner in a Caesar’s Palace restaurant that night.

The next day we searched again. Know where we found the restaurant? Right across from the first store we explored that night! The one with the ginormous gummy worm pictured above. Yeah. We walked 4950 steps more than we needed. SIGH.

By the way, we had dinner at that noodle place the next night and really enjoyed it.

Work on the outline for And When I Wake, book 3 of the Fellowship Dystopia, halted for a week because of intermittent access to the internet. I have to say, Google was fairly quick and quite thorough in fixing the problem. The outline is progressing nicely now. I hope to have it finished and begin writing the first draft in January.