It’s been about ten years since I’ve been any farther from Winnipeg than Brandon, and while I’ve done my share of traveling when I was a kid, with my parents, I’ve never made my own travel plans. Add to that a PTSD reaction, from a period in my life where I had a man in control of me yell at me for hours on end, every few days, that I was worthless and stupid and couldn’t look after myself.

So when got together with The Punkettes and they invited me to join them in BC for the Surrey International Writer’s Conference, my knee-jerk reaction was “I’d love to, but no, no, silly, I can’t go off and do crazy things away from home and family and protection, and – no, no, absolutely not, I can’t do that. Lindsay doesn’t do things like that.”

And of course that sounds silly, so my brain immediately re-routed to excuses – the main one for the last while having been the completely legitimate “I’m too goddam poor to do stuff.”

And then suddenly it sank in that this is the first time in years that we’ve not been strapped for cash. We’ve come into  bit of money, most of which we want to hoard in hopes of buying a house one day, or something – we’ll figure it out, but also, because we’ve been living with the mother-in-law, our living expenses have gone way down.

So I was out an excuse and decided ok, if my best writing buddy wants to go with me, then I’ll go. I’ll do it. There’ll be agents and editors there, and there will be tons of networking I can do, meeting people and all that stuff I taught myself to do at keycon last year and was so successful at. And I’ll get to meet the other punkettes in person, and we can gush about punky stuff together! And my best writing buddy checked her own finances, and being a student, waiting on loans and yadda yadda, she can’t make it.

At which point, I realized I really wanted to go. So I’m going.

And thus begins the BC mission. I wonder if they’ll let me wear my Abney Park flight goggles on the plane? I wonder if it would get me strip searched….

I’ve flown before – I love flying. If you read any of my long form writing, you’ll probably notice a theme of flying machines, animal characters that fly, etc. It always frustrates me that I’m not the sort of person who would likely end up in one of my own stories – that I’m not someone who likes to charge into things and has everything together and confident.

On the other hand, maybe I am. Every time I see myself shying away from these things, don’t I slap myself in the face and tell myself to stop being wuss? I am going after all. Don’t they always say the heros are the ones who are scared, but wade in anyway? So I got registers, I got my plane tickets Sunday (thanks to @AntigothTCO for his reassuring guidance there), and here’s me, bravely flying my flagship novel across the skies into battle.

TAKE NO PRISONERS!