Days 78-86: Hot water

Every so often I take a break for a week and check into a condo timeshare. The purpose: Unlimited hot water for showers and hot tub. Pinecliff in Ruidoso was a great example. It's an older timeshare development and the rooms show a little wear, but the rustic atmosphere is perfect for the area. And whatever the facility lacks, the staff makes up for. I've never had such a pleasant orientation breakfast or a staff that offered to lead tours (at no charge) for those of us who wanted a little more education on the places nearby.

The first stop on our tour was St. Joseph's Church on the Mescalero Apache lands. This church has been in continuous operation for nearly 400 years and is full every Sunday even though the Franciscans no longer staff it with a full time priest. It has and continues to undergo extensive restoration and is quite beautiful. I was impressed with the images in the church.

I loved the artwork, like the Jesus over the altar and this image of Mary in one of the stained glass windows. They all depict Jesus and the saints as members of their tribe. Very personal.

After lunch with my host at a New Mexico buffet in Tularosa, I continued out to the White Sands National Monument. I hadn't intended to take a hike, but there was a trail (sort of) with markers every so often to indicate where to go next. The sands truly are white and the clouds were, too.

The next tour was to the Spencer Theater in Ruidoso. This very expensive and very modern theater sits in the middle of about 70 acres out in the mountains. It has a 505 seat capacity and books traveling productions between LA and points east. A great selection of shows brought to this remote location. They don't do their own productions, so have a permanent full-time staff of only half a dozen plus contract help that come as needed. Before each production, they serve a buffet dinner, usually themed to go with the performance. The theater is filled with Chihouly glass sculptures.

I realized that the timing of my stay in Ruidoso was awkward. I would be spending the first day of November traveling. If you are not aware of it, November is a special month for me. For ten years, I have written a novel (or two) in each month of November. It wasn't going to work out well for me to have to pull up stakes first thing on Friday and move to a new unknown camp. Fortunately, the staff came through again and invited me to spend a couple extra days without charge. As a result, I started writing Thursday night at midnight and kept going until Sunday morning when I broke camp with over 20,000 words in by new novel completed.

Note that this is a Devon Layne novel as it contains explicit adult content. At the same time, I'm pretty damned pleased with the way it's progressing. I even managed to arrange a write-in at Viva! coffee shop in Ruidoso where two of us sat in front of a nice fire and drank our coffee while meeting more than our daily quota of words.

Since the new story is an Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Mystery, I donned my Stetson and saluted all the NaNoWriMo writers pounding out words this month.