Weekender

This past weekend, I did something I've needed to do since the 3rd of August. I escaped. This was the weekend of the Love Designer's Autumn Authors Affair in Chicago. I went down there with several friends of mine. We left early Friday afternoon and arrived at dinner time. After getting settle in our room, we registered and then met up with several friends that we hadn't seen in a year. We had dinner and then played trivia. Our team was the Awesomest Awesomes. We placed third out of five. We had to endure movie clips of exquiste heroes with excellent lines and abs amongst several other categories. It was a lot of fun. We went back up to the room, three of us pulled out our laptops and headphones, and did some writing. My one friend went to bed. And I did some writing. First on my futuristic series and then I went to work on my contemporary paranormal. Saturday morning started early with breakfast followed by registration, and then the opening speeches. Workshops started shortly after that. I went to a plotting workshop followed by one on character archtypes and then one on making your characters suffer is good. And then we went to lunch and sat with more friends and then skipped the luncheon keynote and Q&A to go upstairs and write. I went to a two hour workshop on characterization. Being a pantzer myself, most of what I learned I can adjust to my writing style with absolutely no problem. Others will require a little bit of work. After workshops we went to the bookstore were we all got books and promo materials. And then to dinner. After dinner, we brought our laptops down to the common room, sang filk songs about writers, editors, and urinary tragedies, while we were writing. And then we sang songs from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's musical episode. It was well after 1:00 am before we went to bed. We left after breakfast on Sunday and got home early in the evening. My DD spent the weekend at my mom's and had a wonderful time. And my mom who gets pissy about anything I do, basically was thrilled that I was home, I had a good time, and that I got to relax.

It was weird being in a hotel again. The last time was when my dad died. And a lot of things did remind me of him and that he was gone, but I did put them off to the side, knowing that I would need to get back to them, but enjoying the fact that for one weekend I got to be carefree. I hung out with writers who understand what you mean when you say the voices are all gone and how scary that feels (100 times worse than writer's block). And you don't have to use an analogy to help them understand. They also understand the why of how it happened and I found out that eventually those rifts would heal. I can write again. I can write again. I have ideas for characters. I know where I'm going with stories I was already working on, allbeit not the ones I was writing at the time, namely EK and DR. But I am writing. And I think that in small doses until I'm okay and then they'll bombard me.

I did however pick up two pins -- one says "I hate it when my voices argue with your imaginary friends" and the other says "Of course I can't take a joke, that's why I'm single" which probably sounds worse than it is. But there you go. I absolutely will not apologize for leaving my friends and family to fend for themselves for one weekend nor will I apologize for not dwelling on the fact that I have no social life or that I am still single. Because really, I'm not sorry, and I don't have time.