Thursday, October 7, 2010

The Big Adventures of Cagney and Lacey in Metropolis




On September 15, I embarked upon a journey of faith, fiction, and fun. I set out to arrive in the big Metropolis of Indianapolis, Indiana at 4pm. In actuality, I arrived sometime after 9pm. My friend and roomie, Dorothy, was already there waiting for me, having arrived on the 13th from Australia. This would be the first time that we had met in person, and I was excited to hear her accent. I had taken my time and made a few stops on the way, and thus, I was late in arriving. Keith had sent his GPS along to befriend me, but "she" lost her signal right in the middle of the big city, and caused me to turn the wrong way on a one way street. "She" found the signal once more, and I forgave her for her shortcomings. I made my way to the underground crypt where my van slept for the next 4 days and beamed myself up on the elevator, hoping that I was in the right ship.
Upon my arrival at the check-in desk, I saw my wonderful friend, Dorothy, out of the corner of my eye. I instantly felt like I had just been reunited with my long, lost sister! We chattered on endlessly until we could no longer stay awake at the ripe old time of 1:30am! Her accent was everything she said it was. She sounded just like Olivia Newton John! And I think she said that I sounded like Dolly Parton. Go figure! At any rate, we became an inseparable team of sleuths, delving into classes and sessions, trying to solve the mystery of publication!
We took everything that we learned each day and tried to evaluate great works of fiction. Actually, we picked them to death, until we found something in common with all of the really good books. They had what we called "The Hmmm Factor." The first page made us say that. We were hooked on those books. We poured over our own works of fiction to see if we could plug our new-found formula in. It was there. We had to rearrange some sentences, but IT WAS THERE!
A little sprig of confidence began to grow and we felt as if our note-taking was paying off!
After 3 days of classes and lots of fellowship, our adventure was almost over.
On Monday, we earned the title of Cagney and Lacey by practically running 3 blocks, through the mall, through a store, made a purchase, through another store, across a skywalk, through the hotel, cleaned out our room, checked out of our room, stored our luggage, back through hotel, across skywalk, through store, through mall, and down 3 blocks again-----ALL in 36 minutes! Whew! I said that I ran off all the calories that I was about to eat! The sidewalk was smoking behind us! (Or so we thought.)
Anyway, we were surrounded by people who love God, and write stories of faith and inspiration. We enjoyed fellowship with many of these such as Cindy Woodsmall, Janette Oke, Kaye Dacus, Kim Vogel Sawyer, Connie Stevens, Eileen Key, Tracie Peterson, and many more favorite authors. The event was The American Christian Fiction Writers Conference, and we had a ton of fun. Dorothy has promised me that she will send me more of her famous, Australian "Tim-Tams." (a little piece of Heaven) And I have promised that I will send her a copy of an inspirational book that she dared me to read-(I'm reading it now. I'm highlighting my favorite portions for Dorothy.)
So, all in all, it was worth the 6 1/2 hour drive by myself, Dorothy having ridden a plane for 15 hours and all. She talked to famous people. I talked to GPS. Same thing.
So goes the tale of Cagney and Lacey,........or Olivia and Dolly. (Same thing.)

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the thrills, Cookie! What an amazing few days we had! And what a lot of work we did in such short time :) You were right - we left that pavement smokin!!
    Love
    Dotti XXXX

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