Has it really been a month???

Ok, yes I know it's actually been a month, but there were adventures happening!

For those of you who aren't as interested in the reading and stuff just watch this explanation (thanks to WRappin and Wierd Al for this one)...



For those who are interested in reading...

Let's start with Lisa's stuff...
In the last month Lisa has done four presentations at two national conferences and was awarded a conference internship that covered most of the cost for the one that work wasn't paying for. Competition for the internships is actually pretty tough and at this point Lisa is the only person I'm aware of that got one on the first try!

Lisa is also officially in the data collection phase of her dissertation (she's running tests on people and recording the results) so she's well on her way to actually being DR Kidder!

Of course Patrick wasn't exactly just standing around guarding the walls...

Ok... so maybe I did guard the walls but I did other stuff too!

I went with Lisa to both of the conferences.

At the first one I discovered the old Mormon settlement that was the actual first building in Las Vegas. I also found components for a couple of new stories and finished the almost next to the last draft for Johnson farm. The next steps from here are to put it in the hands of my third group of pre-readers (which includes people who will hopefully be creating my cover art!) and doing the worky icky, make sure all the punctuation is correct, editing.

And of course this happened...

We brought back about 20 LBS of agate and petrified wood. (We also found the worlds largest agate sphere but I'm going to have to find the picture for that one...)

(Lisa found the picture, although there was some funky light reflections on her phone.)

The second trip was in Portland Oregon...

I brought this little pretty home...

I'll be turning this amethyst point into my version of the one that Jamie, one of the main female characters in my novel Johnson Farm, wears.

Speaking of Johnson Farm... NANOWRIMO started while we were in Oregon, so I didn't spend too much time roaming the city. I'm working on the second book of the Johnson Farm series with three more planned. Hopefully I'll be releasing one a year for the next five years. But for now it's get the first draft of book two done this month (27,000 words (about 114 pages) so far and about that much more to go...), and then get the first book out and on the market!

So, for all the nieces and nephews that bugged me about being in one of my books that one's coming too (about 70 pages done) but I needed to give it a rest to get this whole book in a month thing out of the way... hopefully you guys' book is out in 2018!

So, what have we learned from all this?
Lisa is a really smart competent person who gets things done.

And Patrick...?
Well, Patrick just has too many things he's trying to do. And...
You can not take that guy anywhere without rocks and stories being part of the adventure!

So, that's the short version...
We'll say more when Lisa feels like writing one; the second book is done; or I go completely insane (or is that completely insaner?)

For those of you who actually read this instead of watching the Albuquerque video...
Here's another one! (This is about the shape book two is in (which is why I'm not writing too much right here right now...))



Thanks guys, see you soon!