Last week, with the large draft manuscript of Terra Incognita #2—The Map of All Things—looming in front of me, I went away for three days to stay alone in a lovely and peaceful cabin in Estes Park, at the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park.  Rebecca’s foot has recovered well enough after her surgery, so she can get around and be self-sufficient.  

With laptop and bags of groceries, and no telephone, not even cell phone reception, I holed up and was able to work uninterrupted for days in a row.  This allowed me to get up a significant head of steam on the first main edit of the new book.  I very much needed the time to sink into the complicated story, all the characters and plotlines, and build a lot of momentum.  In three days, I managed to polish 170 pages, 29 chapters.

The whole time I was there, the weather was sunny and warm enough to have the windows and screen door open (perfect hiking weather, but that was not to be…).  As I drove home, though, a storm front was coming in and it had begun to snow.  Here in Colorado, we had a very mild winter with very little snow; now, though, we got it all at once.  I felt like a surfer racing ahead of a giant wave as I drove back to my house.  Within the next day, front after front came to our area, and we received nearly three feet of snow in a two-day period.

I was scheduled to give a panel and autograph books at Denver’s ComicFest on Friday night, but the weather was so horrible I couldn’t get out of the driveway, and was forced to cancel.  Saturday and Sunday, Rebecca and I were to be guests at a local crafts and antique show, but that too was canceled.  By Sunday , though we still hadn’t seen any sign of a snowplow since the snow started on Friday, we did manage to get out of the driveway (stuck on the road for a little while, but I dug us out), and we made it up to Denver for a belated afternoon appearance at Denver ComicFest, where we met a lot of fans, signed a lot of books, and went out to dinner with fellow writers Kevin Dilmore and Dayton Ward and their friend Derek.  

Today’s forecast is 70 degrees and sunny.  The snow is melting so quickly that the ground is saturated, and we had a leak in our basement ceiling into the room where we store our extra copies of books.  We caught it early and moved most of the books out of harm’s way, but about a dozen copies were destroyed.  (There’s something ironic about a completely waterlogged Dune novel.)  These photos were taken around our house at the height of the snowfall.

KJA