When we last saw our dashing heroine, she was resting after a long and arduous journey across the continent...

After utterly failing to fall asleep for a nap and after discovering that we weren't going to have our "official" meeting until 9:30, I got bored and hungry and rounded up the few other attendees with whom I'd already made contact for a food run. It ended up being six of us by the time various roommates were dragged along and introduced. Oh, and I was supposed to have a roommate--something I had no problem with--but the room they gave me just has one king-size bed. When I got into the room I thought that maybe they'd given me the single room since there are three women attendees--leaving one as an odd woman out--and I have my husband coming to join me on Wednesday. But then after the meeting Judy told me that my roomie was going to show up in a couple of hours. I replied something on the order of, "That's totally cool... are you aware my room only has one bed? And I'm enlightened and all, but... ermm...I'll change rooms if you want."

Well, I guess they decided to let me be in my own room since no one came crawling into my bed last night.

So, back to finding food. The hotel has a shuttle that will take guests anywhere in a 5-mile radius, so the six of us, after a few false starts, made it a brew-pub type restaurant where I had some really disgusting fish and chips. Actually, I didn't have them since I didn't eat them, and the waitress was incredibly nice and took them off my bill even though I didn't ask her to since she saw that I hadn't eaten them at all. I thought that was very cool of her so I made sure to tip her for what the amount would have been. Not her fault the food sucked.

Finally, at 9:30, we made our way to the conference room that is to be our permanent meeting area. It was decorated with Writers Of the Future banners and signs, with piles of previous anthologies on the table. We each had some reading and writing material in front of us, and in the front there was a table for Tim Powers and Kathy Wentworth.

The meeting was not very long; mostly it was a "this is what you are in for and this is what is expected of you and this is what you will get out of it if you want to." Tim talked about how the exercises that we're going to be doing are designed to make us better at the entire process of finding ideas, working with them, and then translating them into actual stories--in a limited amount of time. He and Kathy both also talked about the fact that where you place in the contest really doesn't mean anything as far as your future potential, since it all comes down to taking what you learn in this week and then actually using it. (I'm paraphrasing badly, but that was the general gist of it.)

Finally, after the meeting--by which time I was barely keeping my eyes open with the time change and being up since 3:30am--I stumbled back to my room and went straight to bed. And then woke up this morning at 5am.

Friggin' time change. [grumble]