River Jordan || Author, Speaker, Radio Personality

I keep telling my friends that LOOK WE ARE GOING TO APPRECIATE SPRING SO MUCH MORE THIS YEAR! And we will. Not too much longer and we'll be drowning in honeysuckle and blue skies. We'll shed these layers of sweaters, hats, gloves, long underwear, AND coats - shed them like the old skin hiding under them, and bask on rocks and grassy plains and plastic backyard chairs and pickup truck hoods like hazy, lazy lizards. Don't worry, Spring may sleep but Spring comes.

Oh, that Pulpwood Queens - Girlfriends Weekend Getaway thang - WEll this is what it can do to a person -

Change a shy, introverted, very brunette girl into a big blonde, feather and tiara wearing fool. But fact and folly was that I pretending to be Kathy Patrick founder of the Pulpwood Queens in a skit. Of of course the funny thing is - no one ever says that. Just a picture of me looking scary as though that was the way I dress up for all my parties. Yessiree.

'Tis all in good fun and thankfully - the very, real and not at all frightening Kathy Patrick is looking on with laughter. (Mr. Wonderful always wondered what I might look like as a blonde but I am happy to report after seeing this he is cured!) To matter matters brighter, this photo landed on the cover of the Dallas Morning News. Now, you know my Mother must be sooooo proud.

I could write for an hour to report the strange, weird fun that took place down in Texas but it's

better to let author Ronlyn Domingue www. http://www.ronlyndomingue.com/, fellow introvert and another skit draftee share with her orator gifts and greater camera skills. OH - and the great author group photo - you can't see me because I was being buried alive in the back by those sassy, splashy wordsmiths. Just look at them. Glorious they were and are and a lot of talented fun people who know how to let their hair down and tease it up sky high. Jason Headley http://www.jasonheadley.com/ was headed for the Timberguy contest but decided when dancing suddenly became part of the contest he suspiciously went missing! Well, some

times pictures really are worth a thousand words - courtesy of Ronlyn and Carolyn Turgeon, author of Rain Village.

Now, no doubt as the new year continues I have a few new favorite things. Some of them are old discoveries made new again, some are just simply brand new. I love the New Caveman Commercials for Geico for ridiculous reasons I can't explain and a few I can. I love www.storypeople.com I love discovering a new author I haven't read about or heard about from any review or contact whatsoever - just browsing the bookstore shelves in a dusty old used shop down the corner or a crowded airport on a two over layover that is slllllloooooowwwwwllly turning into four - make that five - due to weather. So where does a writer go but to the bookstore and puruse all the magazine covers and then go reach for a book, something that will really take me away for a few hours. Deep, deep into the myst

erious heart of the human or deep into the mountains of India. Just take me someone that is not this hard chair in this crowded airport with people just like me, even the lady that has been traveling with that cat all day which has just been discovered by the woman three seats over with a dog that she keeps saying she has to walk and I keep wondering 'But where' as she takes it to the ladies room. Yes, take me away - so I pick up a novel like The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. Never mind that it has already been deemed

a National Bestseller and never mind that it won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 - the think is I haven't heard of it SO it's raw to me. And I stand in that crowded airport and read the first line, "All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the grant flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths." And immediately I'm no longer held prisoner by the weather and layovers but I'm transported. And so it goes. Words that transport us to other places, other truths, and deposit us on the other side a little richer, a little less barren, with a little more understanding for another side of life.

I love this song. Some of my new favorite things, the new friends I made during this crazy weekend called Girlfriends Getaway and Kathy Patrick and the way she reminds all of us doing this crazy thing we call the writers life that its okay to have fun, BIG FUN, in the process.

Oh - yes, and Spring. Spring is one of my favorite things this year because its 19 degrees outside and this woman has the flu and is just a little on the cold side and it's not here yet but, you know, I think I can feel Spring longing to stir and waking up somewhere deep down under those frozen roots.