I’ve been missing for over a month now from my blog and from Facebook, well, except for a few mind-transmitted messages from the wilderness where I found myself after I fell off the NaNoWriMo trail, just a week into the journey with barely 4,000 words under my belt (but hey, I managed to conjure up a viable story idea with a great protagonist). I’m not sure what happened other than I have a really shitty sense of direction. But on the other hand perhaps I needed to be in the wilderness for a while, frustrating as it was. A time of renewal perhaps. One can only hope.

However, while in the wilderness I managed to do four things: I wrote a 700-word essay on “The Greatest Lessons I’ve Learned as a Writer,” for what will hopefully be a
guest post on fellow writer, Cate Russel-Cole’s blog in January (the piece actually turned out to be more of a statement on how writing changed my life–hope that works out for Cate); I fractured my little toe; I signed up for a class with Carnegie Mellon University on “Argument Diagramming” (more on this in a later blog), and lastly, I came across Absolem, the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. He was sitting on a leaf on a kumquat tree (yeah, there was one of those in the wilderness, my sustenance).  He had a face just like Absolem, I’m telling you. Freakish. Delightful. My photo does not do him justice. Where is my friend Britton Minor Grafensteiner with her micro-lens to capture his elfin face, his eyes as he checked me out, the bong by his side. Cool.