The drive was harsh to Book 'Em NC.

Most of you know that I spent this past weekend in Lumberton, North Carolina at the Book 'Em authors' conference and book fair. And boy, what a weekend it was! It was such a crazy weekend that it has taken me this long to get started on my blog posts about it. Yes, posts. . .plural. Hell, I didn't even unpack until this afternoon.

The event wasn't until Saturday morning, but considering how long the drive would be we left Friday morning. I had everything arranged so that we could drop the kids at school and head straight out of town. We were heading on down the highway at 7:15am.

All was well and dandy until just below Atlanta. Rain started slowly, sprinkles, drizzles here and there. Then we exited to the second (of three) Interstate and the heavens opened up with the intent of drowning everyone below. We stopped three times in an attempt to simply take a breath. Once under a bridge as trees whipped around throwing stuff at the vehicles driving by. Traffic had slowed to 30 MPH in whiteout conditions at that point, the radio stations were blaring their emergency broadcasts with warnings/watches of tornadoes in the are, and all you could see was the single yellow line on the left side road.

*This was before it got too rough to see*

Needless to say, we were behind schedule by the time we made it to the Country Inn Suites in Lumberton, NC. I was just glad we'd made it safe & sound considering we'd seen 5 different cars off the road in the process of getting there. Eek!

Luckily, the drive home Sunday was much more pleasant, with sunshine and no rain. Instead of being half an hour behind schedule, we were 1 hour ahead on Sunday. Much better than expected.

Stay tuned tomorrow when I talk about the Author Meet-n-Greet dinner. Later in the week I'll post about becoming a candy pusher. Yeah, it happened before I knew what was going on. :D

Stay tuned!

Heading out of town.

Good morning everyone.  Happy Presidents Day!  Hopefully all of you are enjoying your day off, staying warm and just taking in a peaceful day.

Tim & I are taking the kids and heading up to Pigeon Forge, TN here in a little bit.  I spent yesterday washing laundry and packing everything.  This morning we're just packing the cooler with drinks, snacks, cold cuts, etc.  I take as much as I can when we're all going somewhere.  It makes for a cheaper trip when they can eat several meals from food we bring with us.

All the snow we've had over the weekend (and last night) altered our travel plans.  We were going to take the camper and stay in a campground, but now we're staying in a motel for the week.  It costs a bit more (blech), but at least if we get snowed in I won't mind so much.  :-)

I'll be taking the laptop with me to check e-mails, upload pictures, post to Facebook, and all that jazz when I have time.  So if you need to contact me, go right ahead.  It may take me a bit longer to respond, as I won't be online until late in the day and first thing in the morning. Nonetheless, you can contact me if need be.  :-)

Okay, I guess that's it.  Time to pack the laptop into it's pretty purple case and get ready to walk out the door.  Tim's giving me the "Come on," look.  LOL.  Don't forget that tomorrow is Excerpt Tuesday.  Tomorrow I'll focus on my last Fiona & Alex story...  A Twilight Abduction!

Have a great day!

Snow again? Really?

Why must Mother Nature torture me so?  Why is there all this white stuff covering the ground, vehicles, porch?  This is nonsense!  Ugh!

Here in north Georgia we somehow accomplished a snow accumulation of around 2-3 inches (just going by what's on my front porch).  I don't know why, but I do know that I don't like it one little bit.  "I have plans," she screams skyward.  "I don't want anymore winter!"

Yes, yes, I've mentioned that snow is pretty.  And yes, I was probably excited about that first snow of the season, weeks and weeks ago.  But now, I'm downright, utterly, extremely sick and tired of all this cold, mushy, dreary weather.  Not only that, but this new batch of snow is really putting a kink in our plans to go out of town next week.

If this mess isn't all out of here by tomorrow we'll have to cancel our reservations at the camp ground.  :-(

On the upside, before the snow started yesterday we waved good-bye to my van as it was hauled away by a tow truck and taken to the mechanic.  Yay!  I can't wait to get her back.  The only thing I'll miss from driving Tim's car around are his huge speakers.  I can listen to my music the way it was intended to be listened to... LOUD!  Oh well, I'll trade thumping speakers for space and comfort any day.  :-)

Today, well, I don't know what I'll be doing today.  I had planned to do some camper cleaning and packing, but there's still a lot of snow out there.  Burrrr!  I do know that we'll go out to pick the kids up from my mom's around noon.  I have some errands to run, but don't know if we'll get to them in this mess.  Overall, it's a day of whatever happens happens. 

A little update on Time For Death:  There is this literary agency that's been my top pick for a while now.  I've been putting of submitting a query to them for a while.  No one likes rejection, but that's part of a writer's life.  Nonetheless, I put off submitting because of the fear of being rejected by my to choice... kind of like college choices.  However, I finally broke down and submitted to them.  You can't find success by sitting back in fear or uncertainty.  If you don't try, you'll never have the chance to succeed.

So I queried my favorite agency, hit the send button on that e-mail, jumped off a cliff in hopes of hitting water instead of concrete.  I told Tim, "There's no taking it back now."  And now I wait... 

Like I told someone the other day, "In this game, you wait for them.  They don't cater to you.  You'll hear from them when they get good and ready for you to hear from them."  We writers must be patient and try our hardest to resist the temptation to obsess.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Okay, that's it this morning.  I suppose I should go do something.  Bah, humbug to winter!  Try to stay warm if you're dealing with this nastiness too.