[[Welcome to my weekly writer’s diary where I’ll share my “Woot Woot!” moments and the not so “woot woot” moments of my writing world. And, yes, I might even share the occasional musing or two about reading and writing, two of my favorite things!]]
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Dear Diary,
It’s Thursday ~ 10/25/12 ~ and…
I’m continuing where I left off last week when I mentioned how much I love social networks and the friendships I’ve made across the country. I spent two glorious days last week visiting with friends I made online. I thought you might like a peek at what we did.
I spent the night in Colorado Springs with Linnea Hall(http://www.amazon.com/Linnea-Hall/e/B004LL0OFA). We met when I went to Tennessee to speak at her chapter couple of years, but we’ve chatted ever since. When I heard she was coming to Colorado for several days, I just had to find a way to go play. And did we play! We didn’t have much time around her conference, but was able to dash out before it got dark to explore the Garden of the Gods. It was doubly fun for me because, long as I’ve lived in Colorado, I’ve only driven through the area once.
It truly is beautiful, one of the reasons why I love my Colorado Rockies! See for yourself….
Love the red color of these rocks!
Looking west where the sun has gone down but the sky is still light enough to take pictures.
Love all the different strata colors.
Fascinating erosion variations.
Balancing Rock!
It’s all fun and games until some silly tourist knocks the rock off balance…Linnea! 🙂
My friend, Linnea. Last stop, Balancing Rock, before too dark to explore.
We drove out of the Garden of the Gods park into Manitou Springs where I knew the BEST restaurant for the hungry and adventurous. Stagecoach Inn has been around forever (some say it was the original stage stop 100 years ago) and has a few specialties I wanted to introduce to Linnea. Specialties she can’t get back in Tennessee anyway…like Rocky Mountain Oysters (yummm, a fav of mine). Yes, we’re talking Bull Bullocks, “balls” for the less squeamish. Done right, they can be great eating, and Stagecoach does it right! We also tried their smoked pheasant soup. We rounded our meal off with buffalo pot roast and homemade berry cobbler. We were stuffed when we were finished, even had leftovers to take back to the hotel, but it was well worth it! It gave us the energy we needed to sit up into the wee hours of the night in our pajamas talking.
The next morning, Linnea went back to her conference schedule and I dashed off to a friend’ s house fifteen minutes away in the foothills. Lori Kander is a friend I met on a MySpace readers’ group, if you can believe it! We were online friends for years before she moved to Colorado and we finally met. I got to see her lovely new home (well, it DID take me a while to get down to her!) and we spent several hours visiting and brainstorming her new book. (I wonder how many of us who read prodigiously end up picking up a pen to put to paper. I’m sure there are lots!) Sadly, I left my camera in the truck when I arrived and we got sidetracked by what is turning into a great book, so I have no pictures of Lori or the foothills around her to share. I’ll be sure to share her photo when she publishes her book — she will — and I highlight her on one of my Book Bench blogs.
Around the fun stuff, I had a tough decision to make. I had already scheduled to conduct my 4-week online workshop, The “W” Plot…Or The Other White Meat for Plotters, several times through the next year. But I have some surgeries coming up that forced me to cancel all of them except for January’s date with STAR (Southern Tier Authors of Romance). My online workshop career will have to go on hiatus for a while. I’ll miss the fun of exploring student plots but I just can’t take a chance I can’t give everyone 100%. When I take the schedule back up, I’ll be sure to make an announcement. Thankfully, I have made my workshop available on my website at www.karendocter.com for those who still want the full class lectures, so I’m not completely deserting my fellow writers!
Interestingly enough, directly on the heels of sending out my cancellation emails, I received an invitation to go back to Phoenix to do my full day, “W” workshop for the good folks at Saguaro Romance Writers. I did the workshop for them several years ago and had a great time, so I’m looking forward to doing it again. I decided I could do the physical workshop for them since it’s only one day and it’s not scheduled until October. Still, going to keep the rest of the year open so I can work on getting back on my feet and running…literally. Hmmm, maybe not. But walking would be nice!
I’m sure I have lots of other things I could share today, but I’ll refrain. I really need to get this posted since it’s running about fourteen hours behind schedule. 🙂 Wishing you all a wonderful week!
See you next Thursday for another rousing entry in Karen’s Diary Drop-In….
So far I’ve met with one friend from Facebook. We only had time for lunch, but it was amazing how easy it was to talk with each other. She and her husband were on an anniversary trip to Las Vegas and it brought them right through 29 Palms. I’m sure her husband must have wondered what we chatted about on Facebook to have so much to say to each other.