Chaos Central.

This is not my workplace. My own workplace is pathetically cluttered, and I am indeed surrounded by piles of papers and books. Chances of finding anything I’m looking for are not good. But somehow I must wrestle order into all the partially done projects and chaotic clusters scattered around in my apartment . . . by next Friday.

I must also wrangle order into my brain, which makes the clutter in the picture look like an amateur. So much to do, so little time, and I’m too excited to focus on any one task. Today I spent an hour looking for my thermal underwear (not needed here in temperate Coronado CA) because Pat (probably in the same crazed prep phase as I am) told me Spain was cold.

Even this post is disorganized, and it’s the last one from me until I return from my trip. Happily, you will be blessed by excellent blogs by excellent writers while I’m gone. The wondrous Kathleen Eagle will be here next week, and my frequent partner in crime, writing, and traveling–Alicia Rasley–will follow with her own version of how we got together and continue to occasionally work together as collaborators. If she wasn’t so funny and wasn’t telling it like it was and is, I might be miffed. Instead, I laughed my head off (Ha! So that’s where my brain went!) reading her account.

Really, one Can-Opener is as good as another. But I'll make a fuss when Lynn comes back, just to remind her who really matters in the place. Namely me.

Meantime, Thea the Wondrous will tend to Monsieur le Comte, who will doubtless miss me for a nanosecond.

While I’m gone, I’ll be taking a lot of pictures and researching my next novella in the Drewe Sisters series. There was one sister, Yvette, who didn’t get her love story told in our first round. What to do? Alicia and I collaborating on one novella? Or draw straws to determine which of us would write it?

And then, miraculously, I discovered an all-new sister that none of the other sisters knew about. And lo, she happens to be living in Spain. What a coincidence! Her name is Lucinda, and presently, she’s a flamenco dancer. The man who wins her heart is a career soldier who made a brief appearance in Alicia’s novella, “Allegra’s Song.” We often wind up writing about characters from each other’s stories. They all lived about the same time, after all, and the military men usually happened to join the 52nd Regiment. It’s our own little world within the larger world of Regency England, where many of our characters wind up interacting with one another in our books. Fact is, they are so real to us that we cannot bear to let them go.

Sorry. Mindless rambling here. Mostly I wanted to say that I’m really excited about my trip with Pat Potter, seeing two countries I’ve never visited, and having the opportunity to combine my three favorite things in the world (not counting  my good friends and my cat): travel, inventing interesting people, and making up stories about them.

See you all in late March, with pictures and travel tales galore. If you’re on twitter, follow us at #RegencyTwisters (me and Alicia). If I can learn how to use my new Ipod Touch, I’ll be tweeting from Spain and Portugal. But don’t hold your breath!

Adios, Amigos.