I was coming home from the parents’ on Thursday when those blogs posted, so I wasn’t in a position to tell you about them–and I’ve kind of been on a computer break since then.

Do y’all ever do that? Just stay away from the computer, because you know if you log in, you won’t get away for Hours, and you just have to much to do to take that much time at the machine? Anyway, I was Verra busy over the weekend–well, except for my major nap Sunday afternoon. If you don’t take a nap on Sunday, the whole week doesn’t work. So I napped.

Had an all-morning doctor appt. Friday a.m., then errands–got about 6 books from library. One I think I own. Read the library book again anyway.

Saturday, I repotted my orchids–or maybe I did that on Friday afternoon. Somewhere in there. I had bought a grocery-store orchid (phalaenopsis) about a year and a half ago, and it survived my neglect over the winter in the house. (I don’t remember if the flowers are like the ones in the picture, or of they have more white on them with the purple just in the middle, but they’re similar…) This spring, it made a baby orchid on the flower stalk I neglectfully didn’t cut off. So neglect isn’t necessarily bad!

I didn’t know what to do with the baby plant, so I just left it there. And sometime in the late spring/early summer, I bought another orchid from the grocery store, because the one I got for my anniversary died. (It wasn’t potted right, and its roots rotted. I do know that orchids Have to have drain holes in their pots.) The new one had similar flowers. And I stuck them on my outside wire plant stand, watered them occasionally, and finally brought them inside the first weekend in December, because snow was predicted.

That was when I noticed that the newer orchid had new buds coming out on the flower stem I hadn’t cut off this plant either. (Grocery store orchids are usually blooming when you buy them. Don’t cut off their flower stems!!) So I decided that I ought to go to the library and get a book on orchids and see what I needed to do to put the baby in its new pot and how to take care of the things properly. I figured I was doing the right stuff, but I wanted to KNOW I was doing the right stuff. I guess I’m a little OCD like that. I tend to look up books about things I want to know how to do, and read everything I can about them. Then I try to do things right–but I tend to win more from benign neglect than anything…

Anyway, I discovered that if a phalaenopsis isn’t blooming for you, that if you let it deal with cooler evenings, down in the 45-50F range (7 – 10C), a lot of times it will put on flower buds and bloom. Huh. So by leaving the plants outside till it actually threatened to freeze, I was doing the Right thing to get flowers. How ’bout that…

I also learned that I just had to cut off my baby from its stem and put it in a pot. Since my baby had already made four aerial roots, it is a little ahead of other rootless babies–but I put rooting hormone on the stem anyway. And I bought a Home Depot orchid. A cattleya, but it’s supposed to make sprays of flowers, not singles. (I think they’re supposed to sort of look like the ones in this lower picture.) I’m getting brave and adventurous, branching out from the grocery-store easy-grow moth orchids…
Wish me luck with my new enthusiasms.

My 15-year-old Christmas cactus died here in the Land of Great Humidity. It just rotted. And I couldn’t keep the bougainvilleas watered. They grow GREAT in the ground, but I’m not planting a bougainvillea until I have my own house. There are some 10 foot tall bush ones on the way to the beach… Anyway, wish me luck. When/if the buds bloom I will post them.

Do y’all have any plant obsessions? Any stellar specimens? Something really cool on your windowsill? Sometimes, just keeping a mother-in-law’s tongue alive is an accomplishment…

EDIT: Actually, I looked at the label on the plant in this picture, and I think this is Exactly the plant I bought. This is Slc. Jewel Box ‘Dark Waters.’ Slc. stands for (something I don’t remember) laelocattleya, meaning it’s a hybrid. Anyway, I think this is what is on the label on the plant I bought… So. Cross your fingers that I can convince it to bloom.

I went on my annual pilgrimage to Valley Mills with my writer friends for the Heart of Texas writers’ retreat.

The place we go isn’t fancy. There are cobwebs in the rafters, and the floor slopes across the back room from the bathroom to the back door. There are 3 bunk beds, providing room for 6 to sleep, and a double bed at one end of the front room. (There’s a kitchen at the other end.) There is no heat unless you light the propane heater–and we didn’t light it. It got COLD that first night…but warmed up later. My friend Belinda and I went out a day early because we both had the day off. And it was wonderful.

There’d been a lot of rain lately, so the tank (man-made pond, for you non-Texans) right behind the cabin had water running into it, and out of it–into a pretty good-sized waterfall not too far away. Lots of limestone makes for lots of waterfalls. When there’s enough water to fall. This was the first time the tank’s been full enough to have a good-sized creek running out of it, and the water sang to us the whole time we were there.

We critiqued my synopsis (B came up with the perfect last line for it.) We wrote our morning pages. Belinda and I are going through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron together, and we were bad. We wrote our morning pages together, and we kept stopping to talk. It took us a couple of hours to finish. By the time we went into town for lunch and got back to the ranch, the other participants were starting to show up.

Friday night, we had 7 there by the time everyone got off work and came out. We ate sandwich for supper. (One great BIG sandwich in a ring, we cut into sections. We ate that sandwich a couple of days.) We critiqued the chapters of the people who sent them–four of us. We talked plot for the chapters we critiqued. I got too loud.

Four of us spent the night, one more came back around 10:30 a.m. And we did some writing drills–the ones where you take an assortment of items out of a bag and write a scene that includes all of the items. We plotted stories for me and another lady. B and I walked around the tank and down where we could see the waterfall from the front side. Sort of. Then we jumped the creek to get back. I took off my shoes and socks, in case I fell in. I didn’t have walking shoes, and I almost slid out of the backs of my clogs climbing the back side of that tank, because clogs don’t have backs.

We spent some time writing on our own stuff. B and Diana (the middle person in this second picture–Belinda is on the right and Shelley on the left) went into town to get Diana some water, and brought back pizza for supper. After supper, we watched the movie “Twilight” and then analyzed its plot points. We used the plotting method from the Save the Cat book by Blake Snyder, and found it interesting that the main plot was the romance between Edward and Bella, and the subplot was the bad vampires. Most movies are the other way round. We talked writing until midnight or so, and it felt like we’d hardly got started.

Of course, after sleeping 3 nights on those bunk beds– they weren’t bad, but they weren’t the best beds in the world either– we weren’t exactly looking our best. Belinda did not want her picture taken. I haven’t seen all the pictures taken of me. I’m hoping I can cut myself out of the worst ones… Yes, I forgot to take my camera. I forgot my sleeping bag–you think I’d remember my camera? (The beds had clean sheets and blankets that worked just fine.) I remembered all the critiques I’d printed out, and my notebook for the morning pages. The important stuff. (Also my toothbrush and blow dryer.)

Sunday, we got up and did some other exercises, then cleaned up, threw away our trash, divvied up the remaining groceries (I got the Fritos, a package of bagels and the blueberry cream cheese), hugged everybody good bye and went home again. We’re going to try to do this again in the spring, so we can have a spring and a fall retreat, more than just once a year.

So now my synopsis is fixed, my partial’s been critiqued, and I’m printing it out to send off to the agent. I really like retreating…

I will try to get pictures downloaded this week and posted. The grandboys (and their daddy) have come to visit for the week, and their dad is sleeping in my office, but I bet I can get some pictures onto the blog. I have pictures of the panda bears and an orangutan crossing the zoo on the special “O-line” cable, and a wolf, and a few other animals. Do not let me forget the pictures!

I took many more pictures at the zoo than at the conference–I kept forgetting to get the camera out–but I do have a few. It was a good conference. I sold about 12 copies of New Blood at the literacy signing–more than half of those donated. The big news about that was that they were all sold to people I don’t know. It’s easy to sell books to your friends, but not so much to strangers. A number were made curious by the steampunk label, so that was all good.

Had my first “OMG, you’re Gail Dayton!” moment, complete with a hug like we were long lost sisters. That was fabulous. And my “fangirl” was a librarian with the Portland-area King County library system. Who did a little “favorite library story” podcast thing with me. I left her card at home, so I’ll have to get back to you with the link.

Got to see the cover to Heart’s Blood, WHICH WILL BE RELEASED IN JANUARY, instead of February as I had thought. I will get it up here and on the website asap. It is gorgeous, and I can’t wait for y’all to see it.

I moderated two workshops, and volunteered at another where the moderator didn’t show and the speaker had transparencies to put on an overhead projector. I swapped out the pages. I went to a number of interesting workshops, but of course, I can’t remember which ones they were at the moment. Several of them helped me figure out why I am struggling so much with this book–the 3rd in the steampunk series–though the biggest thing I just figured out last night/this morning. Which is:

I am once more trying to cram two books’ worth of plot into one book. So I will have to pull all the extra stuff out and focus on the correct main plot. This ought to help tremendously in the “get the &#@$!%*! book written” department. I am now re-doing all my plot points and such. Trying to get it sorted out. I may do this “Save the Cat” style. Yes, I finally found the book.

So–I’ll do my best to get pictures and such downloaded and posted asap. Again, nag me, if I don’t.

So, yesterday was my visit to the Tor offices. Since we’d gone on a sort-of dry run on the subway past the stop where I needed to get off to visit, I took the subway down, but came up the wrong exit and didn’t know which way to turn from my exit. I’m usually not too directionally challenged, but I have had a hard time here keeping myself oriented. I don’t know if it’s the height of the buildings and being unable to really keep track of the sun, or what, but every time I come out of the hotel, I have to stop and look around and figure out which way is uptown (north) and which way is downtown (south). And then I can get where I’m going. And I always think it’s the other way than what it is–or at least a lot of the time I do.

Anyway, I got turned around when I came up from the subway, and walked the wrong way for about 5 minutes, then turned around and went back. Finally wound up calling Heather. Somewhere in all this, I missed the fact that the building I was looking for was actually the Flatiron building, and wound up walking all the way around it to make sure it was the place I was trying to go. But I made it! And everyone was impressed that I took the subway to get there. (Even me!)

I have pictures, and I will post them. Discovered that when I changed batteries in the camera before I left town that I put in an almost dead one. But I have another to put in, so I can take more pictures. Anyway–I visited with Heather a while. We talked to the publicity people and the sales people–they’d just bought an ad for New Blood in RT, which makes me happy. I might get some book excerpt brochures to share around. Just got lots of ARCs to share around, so that makes me happy too.

We went to lunch at an Indian food place, and talked food and traveling. Heather and I have both been to St. Petersburg–the one in Russia. She was there the year after I went. Then we went back to the office, and I got to meet the art guy (he wasn’t there when we went by before) and he had official cover flats. See, they’re doing the title and my name all glossy, and the rest of the cover in matte, which makes the title and the name look Very Cool. It jumps out at you. AND, my name and the outline around the title is actually in a metallic gold, not yellow. And that is Very Cool too. So I got a handful of those too. Sign up for my newsletter. I’ll be giving away some copies of the book soon. When I get home and pick up those boxes of books. (To sign up, send an e-mail to gail @ gaildayton.com with Subscribe in the subject line.)

And after all that cool stuff, Heather took me to the lobby, where there were books lining most of the walls, and said “See anything you like? Take whatever you want.” Well, geez…that was like setting a miser loose in Aladdin’s cave, with the genie gone. I tried to limit myself. After all, I only had a small totebag to carry stuff in. And I still had to pack them in carefully to squeeze them all in. And when I got back to the hotel (on the subway), I had to stop off in the lobby and unpack my bag to get to my wallet where the room key was.

But that was just the beginning of the day!

I took a nap. And read about half of one of the books (the hardback, because I’m afraid it will make my suitcase too heavy). And then went with our friends the Kellys to see The 39 Steps, which yes, is based on the old A. Hitchcock movie, but done as a comedy spoof. Lots of fun. Then out to dinner, with cheesecake. Yum.

More fun on tap today. Will post tomorrow–or whenever I get around to it.

On my way to the panhandle to supervise the packing and loading of all our stuff (of which we have WAY too much), I drove through Smithville to check on the parents. They’ve been in their house three weeks now, and the remodel of their demolished bathroom is on track. Mama called me one day to tell me they’d picked out tile for the bathroom, but she couldn’t remember what it looked like. It looks nice.

I went with them to the county courthouse so they could register to vote at their new address–and we got horribly lost, because we turned left rather than right in downtown Bastrop–and we went to look at carpet to replace the stained carpet they have now. And then, when we got home, Mama took a call.

Seems that the movie that is currently filming in Smithville, starring Brad and Angelina, wanted Daddy to come for a wardrobe fitting.

When he came back in the house from wherever he’d been, he protested that he hadn’t volunteered to be in any movie, and the brother-in-law said “Sure, you did. Don’t you remember? At the parade, when you held up that poster board with your name and phone number on it and they took your picture?” Daddy remembered that.

So he went in to get fitted for their wardrobe, and went back the next day to be in their movie. I, unfortunately, had to leave before he went to wardrobe–but it’s not like they’d’ve let me hang around anyway.

When I asked him how it went, he said he got pretty hot walking up and down the street in a wool suit. He kept forgetting what he was supposed to do, and asking the other old men if they could remember. He was one of the “men who tip their hats.” He thought they finally put him out of the way so he couldn’t mess anything up if he forgot, but then again, if everybody is just milling around in the street, it’s hard to mess up milling… He got a free haircut (he was needing one) and a free meal, and a few bucks.

I asked if he saw anybody famous, any of the stars, and he thought one of the red-haired ladies might have been somebody. But if Brad Pitt was there, he couldn’t tell it.

So that’s my dad’s movie-making adventure. He’s not real sure he’d do it again, because he got awfully hot and tired, but he’s glad he did it once. And when the Brangelina movie “Tree of Life” comes out, we’ll all have to go and watch for Daddy’s hat tipping.

I’ll post a picture of Daddy when the opening comes, so you’ll know who to look for.