For over a year, my daughter and I have been planning a trip to Italy. Since I’m retired, the timing wasn’t much of an issue for me, but my daughter is a different story. She is a teacher, so we pretty much had to limit it to summer. She also usually teaches a summer school session, so we had to keep that in mind. Then there’s her boys with their busy, busy lives. Her youngest plays on a travel baseball team which takes up many of their summer weekends. I scoured the trips for one that would meet our timeline and finalized it in December to take advantage of “early bird” rates. Now our trip is only weeks away!

Last night I got a call from the travel agent. The airlines cancelled one of our return flights! My heart just sank. It means we would miss our connection in Chicago. She wasn’t clear on just what the problem was, or the proposed solution. She sent me the old itinerary for the flights and the new. What it comes down to is spending an entire day in Frankfurt, Germany and coming home a day later. They will pick up the hotel fee and maybe give us some vouchers for food.

I tried to convince them to look for an alternative route to get us home as planned, but nothing worked. We even offered to drive a rental back from Chicago, but they wouldn’t pick up the tab for that. So, looks like we will be even more international than we thought. Wish us luck–Danke!

A couple of weeks ago the city of Green Bay was the site of a huge book and author festival, Untitled Town. As an author, I had attended the first conference last year and could hardly wait for this year’s event to come around. And this time I was scheduled Sunday morning to be on a panel, making the event even more exciting.

My Saturday was booked solid, the entire day. I first attended an open discussion with a literary agent from New York. He was very well attended and answered a variety of questions . They centered mainly on topics dealing with how to get an agent to be interested in your book, writing a query and having a great hook. I enjoyed him.

The next panel featured one of my friends from our local writer’s group as well as another author I had met at last year’s event. It was so fun reconnecting with her and she introduced me to the other members on the panel. They spoke about writing about difficult topics, dealing with death, violence, etc–it was very interesting. I am always so impressed by  how generous other authors are in sharing advice and expertise.

Another panel followed, this one talking about writing for children. I again picked up some good information and added a few more books to my “want to read” list.

The final event I attended that day was an author who spoke about writing for young adults. As I was the first one in the room before he started, we chatted a bit. I took the most notes in his session and came away with a lot of suggestions I will definitely use in my writing and querying.

All in all, I came away from this day spent with many other lovers of the written word inspired and filled with so much excitement to continue my writing. What a great day!

As I went to change into something more comfy when I got home, I discovered I had my top on backwards. I thought back to all the people I had met that day and spoke with and sat next to and all I could do was laugh out loud and shake my head. Oh, brother, nothing but a class act here. No wonder that neckline felt so high!