Back

Okay, well, I got home at 4:30 am this morning, after a grueling eighteen hours on the road, driving back from Florida.  It should have only taken thirteen hours or so, but there were endless stretches of bumper to bumper traffic all through Georgia, which is now a state whose roads will provide nightmare fuel for me for years to come.

The deal was, someone very, very kindly invited me to tag along, basically for free, on their vacation cruise to the caribbean islands of St. Thomas and St. Maartin, and since I've never done anything remotely like that, it seemed too good to pass up.
And even though I'm all kinds of grateful to have been invited along... it turns out that this just isn't my sort of thing.
Yes, the ship was beautiful... in the same way that a really fancy hotel is beautiful.  (It was Royal Caribbean's "Freedom of the Seas", if you want to google it).  But I'm not a party person, and I have no fondness at all for loud crowds, so pretty much the entire trip I was looking for a place to hang out where everyone else wasn't... only the ship, huge as it is, is packed pretty full with passengers and crew.
The islands were a little more interesting, though our time there was so brief that there wasn't time to do much; I did get to take a ride on a catamaran, which was fun, but that's about it.
And it turns out that even on a ship like that, there aren't many places you can find that are set up so that you can put down your laptop and work on a story.  Everything's too noisy, too busy, etc.  Even the 'Library' (I have three times as many books on my shelves as they did in the entire place), which was supposed to be a 'quiet zone', was either pretty much full of people reading (which I really can't complain about; good for them) or, in the middle of the night when I would have had it mostly to myself, it was occupied by a group of eight to ten teenagers who all looked like Hunger Games candidates from District One.  You know the type from your high school/college: attractive, wealthy, arrogant, and utterly dismissive of 'rules' such as 'Please respect this area as a Quiet zone'.  Their loud and obnoxious laughter and conversation-noises were a constant feature of the room best suited for my work, though I did eventually find a couple of very out of the way places to use instead.
(This was surprisingly difficult; one of the best places, a large nightclub sort of thing at the very top of the aft section, was ruined by the canned music that blasted there 24 hours a day; a selection of about a dozen songs, all awful).

Overall, I'd much rather have spent those ten days here at home.  There were a few fun and interesting bits, but mostly I just wrote when I could, and otherwise read a lot of fic and waited for it to be over.
.... And now it is.  I'm back home, very happy to be in my own space again, and hoping to get a couple of chapters out very soon, now that I'm not busy preparing for (and stressing over) getting ready for a trip.

I did a lot of work on future installments of the Dawn/SG:1 story.  There is some CRAZY stuff I want to do there, inspired by a challenge off of TtH (and also just rewatching episodes of the show).  It's fairly out there, and I'm curious to see how people react when they see it....