Whereat I Have Been

So I’ve been very, very busy.

First, last week was the Rio Hondo workshop, hosted by Michaela Roessner and myself.  This was the 20th Anniversary Rio Hondo, which oddly enough did not make me feel old, but young, young, young!  It was the most trouble-free workshop experience I can remember, and everyone pitched in and worked to make the manuscripts and the food and the fun better.

Left to right, we see: Walter Jon Williams, Sally Gwylan, Isabel Whiston, Barbara Ferrer, Maureen McHugh, Diana Rowland, Alex Jablokov, Kim Jollow Zimring, Rick Wilber, Jen Volant, Michaela Roessner, and Barbara Webb.  The speckles you see in the photo aren’t a flaw in the emulsion, but falling snow.  (The weather was extremely variable.)

Four of us were veterans of the very first Rio Hondo twenty years ago, and three were survivors of Taos Toolbox, which made for an interesting mix of enthusiasm and battlefield-induced PTSD.

The food was, as usual, amazing, and I’m still working on finishing off the Cuban pork roast that Barb Ferrer cooked last week.

As if all that didn’t make me busy enough, at the beginning of the week I got the copy-edit for Quillifer, nearly 600 pages which I finished just last night.  The Rio Hondo attendees were very good about giving me a couple quiet hours every day so that I could work on it.

I get to do that all over again in a month, with the page proofs.  Yay?

But for now it’s time to concentrate on Taos Toolbox, which starts in less than a month.  It’s the Tenth Anniversary Toolbox, so the year of anniversaries continues.

More anniversaries!  More editing!  More oxygen deprivation!  On we march, but it’s for history to decide if this snow-filled event is Hannibal charging over the Alps, or Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.