Final report

         My final account of this weekend’s writing conference is a bit delayed.
After my several critique sessions there, Monday was packed with extractions and insertions. . . . and extractions and insertions – to my (bwahahaha!) “finished” novel.

          It was a weekend of learning. The next time I need to break down a door, now I know the correct method

is to turn around and give it a good mule kick. And should someone be galloping toward me, knife in hand, I’ll aim my Sig Sauer 9mm P229 (if I had one) for the center mass instead of dorking around with trying to shoot him in the legs. 

          I was already aware of the importance of protein, but this was brought home again after Saturday’s continental breakfast, where the only evidence of it was the tiny pots of cream cheese for our bagels.

        Through the long morning of no snacks and lots of caffeine, we became increasingly irritable and shaky – we could easily have been mistaken for crabby alcoholics. 

        This is probably the reason only forks had been provided to spread that cream cheese. The hotel’s staff had likely seen the probable outcome of distributing knives among a few hundred mystery writers.  

          I also learned that while free WiFi was available, it wasn’t always available - no big surprise in a hotel filled to the brim with Tweeting, texting, blogging writers.

                                           Relevant to that, this was also a fabulous venue for enterprising electronics thieves. On our arrival, we were all handed identical black Crime Bake totes, which we immediately loaded up with hundreds of dollars worth of laptops and iPads, and then used to save our spot or trustingly hooked on the back of our chairs.

          But then again, in a convention of mystery and thriller writers, the crime would have been solved in under twelve minutes.