I’ll be back today from the NOLA conference in Shreveport some time today, but in the meantime, let me share pics from my adventure in Granite, Oklahoma last month.

Yes, it was all about work. Hard work. See the plotting charts taped to the walls. They looked like crude wallpaper by the time we were done. Here’s my sister taking a break next to Di Dishman and Karen Kelley (Brava author).

This is our hostess, Julia, on the left and a couple more of the bootcampers hard at work. I’m sure they thought the weekend would be a big slumber party, but we disabused them of that idea quickly!

Okay, the weekend wasn’t all work. The ladies treated my sister and I to a couple of lovely meals away from the retreat house. This is the lodge at nearby Quartz Mountain Nature Park.

The scenery in that part of Oklahoma was unexpected. I love the rugged landscape—just wished I could have taken a day to explore on foot.

I can only imagine how gorgeous it would be in springtime. Sounds like another field trip to me!

Just a quick note to remind you that tomorrow will be the start of the “15 Days/15 Reasons” countdown and contest, so be sure to check back!

I know, I know—the Readers Appreciation Weekend was last month and it’s taken me this long to get the photos up?! Can I use the excuse that I’ve been a little busy? Or how about I say that I delayed putting them up since everyone elses’ pics went up already and I didn’t want mine lost among the crowd. Okay, whatever.

Suffice it to say, the pictures say it all. Lora Leigh’s big party rocked! I’m horrible at names, so if you see someone in a picture that I’ve mislabeled, please let me know!

That’s me flanked by Cindy, who shared the drive from Arkansas to West Virginia and back, and Thumper, who’s a long-time online buddy I never met until that weekend!

Natch, the best thing about the weekend was friends—new and old. Meet Lorie O’Clare and Ilke (spelling?), from Stuttgart, Germany.

There’s always one crazy-ass woman who makes the party—her name’s U-vonne (Gawd, I know I misspelled that!).

There was definitely a booksigning, and this was my view of the event.

And there were stars for me to play fangirl to:

Lorie O’Clare and Nalini Singh

Sylvia Day/S.J. Day and her friend Chris (who’s a ringer for Pink!)

Jackie Frank

Progress on Texas Men

Another round of “Write 50 Books a Year” is getting underway at Rose’s Colored Glasses. If you’re a writer and haven’t checked it out yet, it’s something we do every year. If you’ve attended before, it’s a chance to retool your plan. If you’ve never given it a try, you may be surprised how much you learn—and not just from your savvy intructors (Elle James and myself!). I learn something new every time from the people who attend. So if you want to learn to be a more productive writer, get your butt over there and sign up! Did I mention that it’s free?!

I promised pictures from the mini-retreat I attended with friends in North Little Rock last week. Please enjoy, but remember we spent the day outside under a pagoda beside a pool. We never fully dried out between dips in the pool and writing at the little table. Wish I could figure out how to touch up photos (really how to shave fat off!), but y’all know me by now and everything hangs out.

Where the muse hung out all day long!

Shada Royce and Cynthia D’Alba, my sister writers!

Well, I couldn’t very well show their picture and not mine, but why didn’t I hide behind my laptop like Cyndi?!

Not the sexy post you expected from the title, huh? (I have dibs on that title BTW!!)

And it took me two days to post the pics, so sue me! I’m entitled to be grumpy today—it’s my birthday, and don’t bother asking how many candles will be on my cake (let’s just divide a century into two parts and assume the first half has some meaning to me!!!).

On a happier note, I have pictures I took of a recent excursion on Lake Hamilton with some writer friends of mine. Here’s Captain Cyndi, who invited us to stay at her house which sits at the edge of the lake.

Can you tell if Shayla’s having fun yet? She’s as grumpy as I am about having my picture taken.

“The Shade” was dutifully taking notes as we careened around the lake.

Lake Hamilton is in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Probably the greatest concentration of wealth in our poor state lies at its edges. The houses are amazing. This is the one I want to buy when one of my books gets picked up by Playgirl and is made into a series of naughty movies, all artfully done, that cross over to mainstream DVD buyers as the “smut you must have!”

Since I was the one carrying the camera, I have the power of THE CROP! Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me…

I have a fascination with cemetaries.

I know it’s a bit morbid, but you learn so much about people who are long gone by how they honor their loved ones. Sometimes, you see their sense of humor in a glib epitath. Sometimes, you see the tragedies they never recovered from by the carefully chosen poems they leave engraved in stone. “Beloved wife…” “Gentle angels…” The prayers they leave expressing their desire to meet again in the afterlife can bring me to tears.

The writer in me is always inspired by the heavy spirits that linger around the carefully kept grounds.

This weekend I trekked through the Mount Holly Cemetary in Little Rock with a group of writer friends from the Diamond State Romance Authors. Take a peek at some of the things that moved and inspired me.

The daughters of this couple arranged this monument. Not an angel, but a woman sitting by herself and looking very sad. Maybe the daughters thought of themselves and their long wait to see their parents again.

The inscription here gave me the chills! You know it’s going into a book somewhere along the way. In case you can’t read it, this is what is said:

Ever near us tho’ unseen
Thy dear immortal spirit treads
For all the boundless universe
is life—there is no dead

This one was the saddest and most tragic. A husband was buried many years after his young wife and two daughters for whom he had commissioned these statues. The little girls names were Martha and Pearl. Inscribed in their headstones was “Papa’s Baby” and Mama’s Darling” for Little Martha, and “Papa’s Sweetheart” and “Mama’s Pet” for Pearl.

The sentiments had me tearing up, but once I took the picture of the little girls with the robed woman, I realized it looked as though the woman was striding right at me. Got me to thinking…

These are my sisters in crime. If you’re a writer, little field trips like these help “fill the well.” I can’t wait for the next one. I already have scenes playing in my mind set in a graveyard with rustling trees and furtive sounds around me. Yeah, I’ll have nightmares, but I embrace them!

Progress at last! After scrapping all those pages, I made them up and more!

Okay, so I have all these pictures from my trip to Memphis. I know why I took them, but I thought it might be fun to let you see inside my head to know why these particular sights appealed to me (and let you see the wierdness that is me!).

One of the places recommended to us as providing “spookiness” by the nice folks at the Visitor’s Center was the “Metal Museum.” I wasn’t sure if it would be a bust or not, but I’m easy going, so Shayla and I headed straight there from the park (and the cop–see below!).

Approaching the museum, I told her to pull over. A number of rundown, abandoned buildings, that bordered the museum and were formerly an Army Armory, lay just off the road, with just the right amount of spookiness to call to me. We stopped to take pictures and started to banter back and forth about possible uses of a place like this in a good story.

A demon university–“Go, demons, go!”
A haunted, abandoned sanitarium for flesh-eating ghosts?
Or what a great place to stash a body or deliver a sacrifice! (Oooh! Gotta make a note)

I wished I could see it at night, imagining candle moving in windows…or a floating face!

Of course, place Shayla in front of the demolition-ready buildings, and you have inspiration for true horror! And why was she making that face? (You know she’s gonna have a comeback for this! :mrgreen:)

On to the museum, where a few pieces of art caught my imagination.

Of course, I’m thinking about the aliens in the cornfield in the movie, Signs. Maybe, not too useful for what I write, unless I have vampire aliens invading the Earth.

Here’s the stairway to nowhere…or another dimension…where demons enter and escape into their own world!

This one reminded me of an ogre attacking a chicken, until I decided he was really a Titan wrestling a vicious Gryphon. Note the size of his feet–yum! Definitely something I could use in one of my books.

Okay, so maybe they really are lame pictures, but tomorrow you’ll meet John the Trolleyman who took us on a Memphis odyssey.

I’m NOT going to give a progress report on Obsessed today, because I’m trying to keep positive about the fact I trashed 17 pages this AM. I’d boxed myself into a corner, couldn’t figure out a way to salvage the story, and after talking to my girlfriend, Kim Kaye Terry, I had a new direction. I’ve made up about 8 pages today and hope to get some more in tonight. Thanks, Kimmie, for the rescue!

Now, back to my adventure in Memphis. As I said before, I travelled to Memphis with an agenda:
1) Seek possible sights to stash a body
2) Find churches to desecrate
3) Get a picture of a Memphis cop and squad car
4) Find the spookiest places to put my demon horde

Sounds simple, right? And arriving in Memphis, Shayla and I got off to a rocking start that first morning!

We stopped at Riverside Park, which flanks the Mississipi River. I walked along the shoreline and found an interesting eddy where a body might wash up. Click.

As Shayla and I loaded up and started out of the parking lot, we saw a squad car pull in next to an SUV and five women who looked very upset.

Of course, being the rubbernecking authors we are, we pulled over as close as we could to wait out the officer and a) see what he was doing and how he did it, and b) take shots of his car and his person!

Of course, I can’t keep my nose out of anything. And for a true introvert, I still manage to strike up conversations with total strangers without a bit of trouble. I asked one of the ladies what was going on.

Seems the five women, all professionals (lawyer, nurse, probabiton officer, etc.) had travelled to Arkansas to be fitted for their bridesmaids dresses. They’d made it back to Memphis and decided to take a short stroll along the river. They hadn’t been away from the vehicle for more than 10 minutes, but returned to find one of the windows smashed and all the purses that were in reach snatched. They were buzzing they were so mad.

I didn’t blame them, told them I wasn’t just any rubbernecker, but a writer who was a compulsive rubbernecker, so they all told their parts of their stories. Very interesting stuff. They also had some great suggestions for places we should visit for spooky settings. I wished I’d gotten better pictures of them, but didn’t think about it until after they’d left. You can see them to the right in this picture.

Much more interesting was watching the cop. What a gentleman. He was quiet, attentive, got out his gloves to sweep off the seat and floor so they wouldn’t have to get into any glass. He told them he didn’t like seeing beautiful ladies like themselves having to do something like th