RTW: Noooo--Not The Special Hell!

Road Trip Wednesday is a "Blog Carnival," where YA Highway's contributors and followers post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on their blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

This week's topic: This Week's Topic, to prepare for our Bookmobile chat about INCARNATE with author Jodi Meadows next Tuesday, July 31:

If you could be reincarnated as any fictional character, which would it be?

I almost didn't answer this one, because my first (and short) thought was, "All the books I like have Very Bad Things happen to the characters--why would I sign up for that!"

And I definitely wouldn't want to come back as one of the characters in my books--I love to torture them. Not necessarily physically, but with all kinds of embarrassing situations.

And that got me thinking: do you think that's what Hell is like for writers? We're forced to live through all those plot twists we thought were so very clever when we wrote them? I hope not, because I'm really in for it otherwise . . .

Feel free to put a link to your post in the comments if you played along with Road Trip Wednesday. Don't forget to go to the YA Highway post and read all the answers!

Pastoral

We saw this nature show on Alaska once, filled with incredible scenery and footage of amazing wildlife. Wildlife surrounded by seething clouds of mosquitoes. After the program, there was a "making of" feature that showed what the crew had to go through to get those shots--it cemented my belief that I am not nearly dedicated enough to make it as a real nature photographer.

Well, we had a little taste of that last Sunday when we went to Wright's Lake in the Sierras. In order for me to take any pictures, my husband had to stand behind me and flail like he was having an attack of jazz hands. The skeeters weren't so bad if you kept moving (walked the loop in record time), but if you stopped even for an instant they were on you.

I think if I'd had a magnifying glass, I would have seen little cartoon mosquitoes with jackhammers and pneumatic drill bits--they even went right through my bicycle gloves. Hubby had a tidy little row of bites on his neck, between where his collar ended and his hat began.

The irony of the whole thing was that we went up there to scout for a future canoeing trip. Wright's Lake has all these marvelous channels to take a canoe (as in the photo above), and now that we have a Highlander we can rent a boat. When we got there, absolutely nobody was out on the water, they were all huddled in their cabins. We thought it might have to do with the looming thunderclouds, but the real answer became pretty obvious.

October might be better for the mosquito problem, but the water will be freezing if we fall in. That sounds like it could lead to more hilarious hijinks for the blog.