Here I am with my friend Kate Arnold! We have been in the same Zoom memoir class for nearly three years! So we know a LOT about each other! But we never met face to face until yesterday! SO fun! Now I have met five of my virtual classmates (Kathy, Jill, Mary Ann and Lisa are the other four) and I intend to meet three more in September.!
We whizzed all over Eastbourne, to its museum, to a pub where horses grazed in the nearby field, for an excellent dinner, through all these little towns and villages, past chalk cliffs and beaches. She told me about the ghostly chorus of rogue monks urging people to leap to their deaths into the sea from those cliffs, the apparition of a horse and rider that regularly gallops through another town and this phantom drum corp. When I went to bed in my seaside hotel that was straight out of an Agatha Christie mystery, I shut my windows even though I loved those sea breezes, And the whole time, we talked and talked and talked.
I spent the day before with my dear friend Gill, my former editor back when I worked for Business Traveler. She's been good for me for many reasons. She kicked my butt whenever I buried a lead. And one reason I have Gavriela is because Gill, who is just a few months younger than I am, got pregnant with her son Luke when she was in her 40s. And I thought, "Well, if she can do it at this age, I can do it again too!" And guess what. They are a year apart.
Now, of course, Max, as I'm calling my ex in my book (for a while, I called him Dick, which was fun but I decided that it was really too bitchy to be good karma), had something to do with Gav, too. He really wanted another child. And that's a good thing.
Gav doesn't know any of this.. Or Luke. So maybe keep it on the down low!
Anyway, Gill and I went to an over-the-top birthday party for twins turning 60 at this magnificent Georgian mansion with an even more magnificent yard and armies of caterers who found Gill and me to be willing customers. I had not one but two chocolate mousses . And we went home--at 2 a.m.--with chocolate ice cream bars. Gill's 22-year-old son almost beat us home. But not quite.
And she and I talked and talked and talked! So much to catch up on!
Now, tomorrow and Wednesday I'm attending the indy author show that was the catalyst for this trip. And I am SO PSYCHED! I am such an indy author nerd that I am really excited about actually seeing people whose podcasts I've listened to for years or whose whose books and programs I've bought. I'm a groupie. I hope they' can take all the gushing. I'll try to rein myself in.
Last year, the author of Fifty Shades of Grey attended. It started out as an independently published book. Dig it, huh!
I'll keep yuh posted on how the show goes. Meanwhile, just being here and seeing Gill and Kate was SO FUN! I am going to keep on traveling to see friends. I had hoped to meet another one of my classmates who is in London right now, but we might not be able to swing it.
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