On the Road Again

This afternoon I am going to Iowa City for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.  It will be my second week there this year, this time in a class for "Advanced Novel." There are so many interesting people that go over to Iowa City and it is fun to meet and talk with many of them.  Teachers, reporters, event coordinators, lawyers, and many other fields, all of them writers in various stages of their development. 

I started going over for a week at a time in 2009 when my college roommate from 50+ years ago agreed to come out from the Washington, DC area and attend with me.  That fall I began writing my novel, now titled TOO MUCH LEFT UNSAID. It has gone through numerous revisions including having it workshopped several times at ISWF.  I must say that it gets better with every revision, so I have hopes that soon I will be able to say it is finished.

In the course of May and June this year I have flown to the Pacific Northwest with a group of Road Scholars, where we visited Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Victoria, and San Juan Islands.  We rode trains, ferries, buses, vans, and walked, walked, walked.  Great fun and great people there, too.

A week ago a group of 16 people from our church in Pella, Iowa, were returning from a week-long mission trip to Staten Island in New York, where we served in food pantries, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters, and learned about homelessness and HIV/Aids programs.

I will be ready for a chance to relax and collect my thoughts by the end of this week. I hope I will then have some good ideas for finalizing my novel.

And I fully intend to spend some time blogging on a regular basis.  I hope to be passing along some thoughts over the next few months.

Until then,
Peace.