Highlights and Lowlights

Haven't blogged in a while, but I have an excuse: I sold one house, bought another, scraped miles of ancient wallpaper off plaster, painted seven rooms, gutted a kitchen, sanded floors, patched up 80-year-old plumbing, and moved, not necessarily in that order.

My mom tells me that the memory of the pain will fade, but I'm not buying it. When your own movers mock you for the amount of stuff you have, and then they're forced to make THREE trips with the moving truck over a couple of days, and then you must live in the middle of a construction site while the cats have little kitty nervous breakdowns in a tiny attic room more fitting for Mrs. Rochester, well...the experience is sort of burned into your brain.

But one bright spot in all the chaos of the last five months was the truly blissful week I spent at the Highlights Whole Novel Workshop in Honesdale, PA. When my friend Anne Ursu told me that this workshop would be focused on fantasy and asked me to lead it with her, I thought, sure, that could be fun. A week in rural Pennsylvania, hours of writing time in my own private cabin, students fascinated by faeries and elves and demons, fabulous food prepared by a gourmet chef, what could be better? But it WAS better, better than I ever thought. I've never met such hardworking, intelligent, warm and funny people who not only took their own work seriously, but took the work of the other students just as seriously. It sounds hokey but it can't be helped: I learned as much from them as they did from me.

There. I said it.

Now I'm back home and trying to get back to work. But stuff like this is making it difficult to focus.