Long time no post

Sorry I've been out of touch lately. I've been revising the first draft of a novel, trying to get it done before I have to leave this place. What place? The house outside the village of Tesuque belonging to two friends of ours. Tesuque is an agglomeration of houses along a creek near Santa Fe, surrounded by tall trees and a remarkable amount of vegetation considering the semi-arid conditions nearby--and especially the multi-year drouth northern New Mexico has been suffering. Did I mention that it's been raining every day we've been here? It was a wet Indian Market in Santa Fe yesterday and the day before. And a cool one. Amazing. (Of course, we didn't go this year. For why, see the second sentence above.)

What makes this such a great place to work--other than the surrounding beauty and peace and clean air--is the fact that Tesuque is in a hole, a notch between foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains--the notch dug by the creek I mentioned earlier. So guess what? No cell phone connection. Our friends are away and we haven't been using their landline, and calls on it have been infrequent anyway, since all their friends know they're out of town. Pretty cool, huh?

Of course, we do have internet. But mine isn't rigged up to push messages or other interruptions through. That way I can work without distraction. And I did. I revised a 377 page book is two weeks. How good the revision is, who knows? But if it's bad, the fault won't lie with technology.

So now I've sent the MS out to a couple of first readers and I'll sit back and work hard on my real world job and wait for their comments. Do I have a publisher? Do I have an agent? No and no. Would you believe that I'm doing this for myself? For the adventure of finding out what the characters I've whomped up are doing with their lives, how they are coping with some very bad luck they've been handed (by me, darn it). But that's fiction, I guess.