From Denver

It's raining in Denver. What’s the deal, it’s July. Isn’t this supposed to be dry weather time? My hotel’s ¾ of a mile from the convention center. I’m not walking that in the rain.

Fortunately I have a few days. First is the ChiLibris retreat (an organization for CBA fiction writers who've had at least two novels published). Our meetings are right here in the hotel. Today I’ll probably not even see the light of day outside. I can even jog in the workout room.

Yesterday the flight from San Francisco to Denver took about two hours. Guess the time it took me to get to the hotel after landing. Two hours. Loong baggage wait. Then the shuttle. Then lots of traffic into town. Sheesh. I reached the hotel a whole 15 minutes before dinner.

The driver of the shuttle didn’t have to tell me my hotel was (finally) around the corner. I heard the noise. You don’t get 60 novelists together and expect any peace in the place, lemme me ya. I doubt this hotel will ever be the same.

It’s got wireless in the rooms. Yowza.

We ate in at the hotel—a casual catered pasta dinner. I went around hugging everybody, and everybody else was hugging everybody else. Quite the friendly group. At dinner I purposely sat down with someone I didn’t know. New to ChiLibris. Name’s Brad Whittington. You might recognize that name. He won a Christy for his first novel, Welcome to Fred, two years ago. Brad has a blog, www.wunderfool.blogspot.com in which he finds crazy things on the Internet and posts links to them. This is something that a guy who writes novels like the Fred books would do.

Also at the table were Robert Whitlow and his wife, Kathy. Robert’s as southern as you can get (two words out of his mouth and you’ll know), a lawyer-turned novelist. Check out his very cool Web site with numerous videos. His latest big project was producing a movie from his novel The List. It’s now done and in editing. Robert informs me it will have a limited release in big theaters.

A reminder—those of you who want to exchange links for this blog and/or Scenes and Beans, send your hyperlinks on over. I’ll gather a bunch and then put them up on both sites.

Check back here Monday for a special planned post. I can guarantee you it’ll be something you wouldn’t guess. And highly entertaining.

Well, naturally.