Ho Ho Huh?
I’ve been at our annual plotting group hideaway since Thursday, along with the fabulous Cherry Adair http://www.cherryadair.com/ . sensational Stella Barcelona http://stellabarcelona.com/ , terrific Tina Desalvo http://tinadesalvo.com/ , and delightful Delilah Marvelle http://www.delilahmarvelle.com/ . Although each annual event is held at a marvelous location, it really is a workfest bar none. We spend MANY hours plotting new books for each author and come away with enough notes and inspiration to write our new book in a week!
This getaway is proving to be quite the unusual one, however. Yesterday, we were working on the first book of a new trilogy I have in mind when some weird things started to happen. Now trust me, I live for weird, but having them happen while plotting one of my books felt especially unusual to me. I’ve yet to connect all the dots, and maybe they’re not supposed to connect, but I’ll tell you about them and see what you think…
First, picture me sitting at a long plotting table with my four wonderful writing buds when suddenly I’m shot in the right eye with a beam of sunlight that seemed to come out of nowhere. It was mid-day, plenty of sunlight, but this felt like a laser beam directed for my right eye. I yelped with surprise, and it vanished as quickly as it came. Five minutes later, I hear what sounded like a dog whimpering outside. I stopped what I was doing and listened intently and heard it again. I mentioned it to the girls, but not one of them had heard it. I brushed the incident off and about five minutes later, a squirrel threw itself at one of the side windows near where we were sitting, all four paws hitting the glass, startling the heck out of all of us. It, too, vanished as quickly as it had come. As we’re chattering about the squirrel, one of the girls points to the large window behind me—the same window that had shot me in the eye with the laser light—and exclaims, “Look!”
And this is what we saw an eight point buck! He just stood there and never even flinched as we oohed and ahhed and ran from window to window taking pictures of him. Deer have been known to come near homes in the area, but not this close, and certainly none that wouldn’t bolt at the first hint of movement from somewhere nearby.
He nonchalantly made his way across the back lawn as if this was a daily ritual for him. It took us a few moments to get settled back into plotting after that event. And wouldn’t you know it…maybe fifteen more minutes pass and we all hear this huge crash coming from a nearby room. We all jumped up from our chairs and ran for the room, where we all came to an abrupt halt at the doorway of the room. A large bookcase covers the right wall of the room, and the books from one of its shelves were strewn across the floor. We all felt chills running up and down our bodies as we slowly examined the chaos. At first I thought one of the shelves had simply slipped from the adjustable shelving pegs and fell to the floor, dumping the books along with it. Upon closer examination, however, I discovered that the back pegs were tilted down and the front had no pegs….they had been sheered off, as though something or someone had yanked hard on the front of the shelf. Here’s what we saw…
See how the back peg is tilted?
The other odd thing we noticed was that out of all the books on the floor, only one had fallen open. Volume 8 of an old book with page 28 ripped out of it. That page contained a picture of funeral carriages…
Needless to say, it took a while for us to get settled back into plotting mode!
Oddly enough, today not a single weird event has happened. Maybe because we weren’t working on my book today, but Tina DeSalvo’s new Christmas book. Kinda hard for weirdness to cramp Christmas’s style.
The entire group full of Christmas spirit!
Tossed post-its from ideas gone astray.
Celebrating the plot completion from one hell of a GREAT Christmas book!
Just wanted to share the last couple of days with you. And who knows, the plotting for today is done, but the day isn’t. If anything else appears, disappears, or crashes I’ll let you know. 🙂
I’m just so very glad you’re back. More than anyone can ever know.