The answer, it seems, is no. Or this one would have perished weeks ago.

I didn’t mean to leave my Writer Friends hanging. It’s just that I’ve been busy revising novels, writing short pieces, and living a life.

Yes, one of those. I went on a road trip with the kids, and we had a blast. Was it bad that I kept thinking “I’m getting so much MATERIAL here!”every time we stopped somewhere cool? Come on, the World’s Biggest Pistachio? Enormous cave structures (Speleothems, or somesuch) shaped precisely like giant boobies? (According to my 10 year old son, naturally, who giggled his way through Carlsbad Caverns. You’ve never seen the ninth wonder of the world until you’ve seen it with a little boy who keeps whispering “nipples!’ every few minutes To be fair, I was thinking the same thing.)

We saw petroglyphs – which have already made an appearance in a short fiction piece this week — and sledded down the dunes at White Sands. We took pictures of badger tracks, and kangaroo rat tracks, and all sorts of other tracks in the early morning, and watched an evening storm that rolled in all around us, flooding the mountains, while we stood on the dry, silent dunes. Gorgeous.

My favorite moment was watching the “Dance of the Pour” at the bronze foundry in Shidoni, outside Santa Fe. A giant cauldron of molten metal splahing like lava all around? You know that’s going into something I write… someday.

So, that’s what I did on my summer vacation. Now, I’ll spend a few weeks revising some manuscripts I’ve got ready to polish, and send out a thousand small subs so I can get those little ego boo moments every now and again (to offset any possible rejections) and I’ll try to blog a bit more frequently. But who knows when life will start happening all around me again, and I’ll need to put down the keyboard and go build the moments that actually make books wonderful?

So… what did YOU do on your summer vacation?