Road Trip To Natchez!

ROAD TRIP TO NATCHEZ

*Or, the Adventures of Elducka

September 27, 2025

On the road east from San Diego….

Why post a travel blog, you might ask?

Let me provide some background for anyone new to my stories. I have written a couple of related series about guardian angels. The first is the Guardians series, which is set in the modern era and tells the story of a little girl named Natalie who is a Seer, which means she can communicate with her Guardian. The three books in that trilogy, Guardian, Seer, and Demon, are being self-published now, with Demon’s release date coming up on November 30.

The second related series is called The Seer Chronicles, and is a historical fiction story of a Seer named Gregor. It takes place beginning in 1810 in a town called Natchez, Mississippi. When I started writing this story two and a half years ago I had never heard of Natchez, but I knew I wanted it to take place in the South prior to the civil war, and just randomly selected the date and location before I started writing.

This story has absolutely possessed my mind, leading me to research and write in a frenzy. I have spent the past two years dreaming of Natchez, a place I’ve never visited, and feeling very much like Gregor is a real person who speaks to me, and is eager for me to tell his story. Ever hear Anne Rice talk about Lestat? How he felt very real to her? Gregor is like that for me.

Anyway, I am currently writing the 9th book in the Seer Chronicles. I have been itching to get to Natchez, and wanting to take a big road trip there for two years now, but family obligations kept pushing the date back.

But today, finally, my husband Steve and I have started our journey!

It is actually happening! Right this minute, as a matter of fact. I have realized that I can type in the car, trying to minimize car sickness by looking ahead out the windshield and only glancing at the screen of my laptop intermittently, which works pretty well. Wearing my hat helps too, my cute baseball cap with the Guardian angel wings logo which I purchased from Redbubble, because the brim of the hat blocks my view out the side window, so the landscape is not rushing by in my peripheral vision. I can type without constantly watching the words. My fingers know what they’re doing. I already typed an update to my Figuring Out Self Publishing book for Inkitt, then took a break to let my stomach settle a little, and am going again. My Chromebook can’t connect to Google Docs without wifi, but it will update the document locally, then next time I’m connected to the internet it will update on Drive.

So we are at this moment entering the California desert, having left our house at 6:40 a.m., and it is now 9. We didn’t get very far before our first stop, just a few miles, because we met our kids and grandkids at Sheldon’s Service Station in La Mesa, an actual converted old former gas station and garage, with a nice outdoor dining patio. We enjoyed some breakfast and one last visit with our 6 and 2 year old grandsons before we leave for a month. Those kids are both going to be a foot taller by the time we return and quite possibly shaving by then.

Then we were really off on our adventure, and are heading east on the 8, coming up on El Centro, heading towards Tucson tonight.

The road trip is happening!

Leading up to it, I spent a lot of time getting my book Demon ready for self publication. I realized that if I really buckled down and worked hard I could obtain the author proof copy before I left on the trip. And it worked! Amazon delivered the proof of Demon yesterday. The interior file I think is pretty much ready, but the cover still needs a lot of work. I have my iPad with me so I’ll continue to work on that during the trip, as well as reading the paperback and making note of any needed changes. I’m going to just write notations right in it - for Guardian and Seer I used sticky notes but I think for traveling it’s easier just to mark it up. Then publication date will be November 30, so when I get home I have a couple of weeks to finish everything up, get ARCs sent out to readers, and see how it goes.

Update 3:00 p.m.: We passed through absolutely torrential downpours heading into both Yuma and Tucson, but we’ve arrived in Tucson safe and sound. A friend who follows me on the Life360 stalker app, apparently got a notification that we were experiencing a flash flood warning in our area. We had gotten those notifications on my phone, and it was really reminding us of driving through the derecho in DC in 2012. Steve was looking for an exit to get off the freeway and wait it out, but by the time we got to the next exit we had driven out of it. Another giant storm heading into Tucson, also over after a few minutes of driving. We saw later on the news that this is the most rain Arizona has received in years! And of course we had to be driving right through it.

At a rest stop in Arizona we saw the most astonishing rock formations nearby, enormous boulders left balancing precariously by eons of erosion. I’ve used this picture as the cover photo for this book, but I suspect I’ll be switching the cover image as we find new amazing sights on our journey.

We had lunch at the Space Age Restaurant in Gila Bend. It has space alien statues and space murals and a big UFO on the roof, and somewhat mediocre food - but the atmosphere is a lot of fun.

We arrived at a hotel I had found yesterday online by about 3, and they had a nice room with two queen beds available, so we had a quiet afternoon relaxing after our long drive.

Well, the way I was relaxing was by updating all the writing I accomplished in the car on the drive. I’ve added it up, and discovered that between everything I wrote over 6,000 words during our 6 hour car ride! Wow! I am very happy that I have figured out that writing is possible in the car. I was super productive. It was as cool, possibly even better, as sitting on the front patio to write. I updated my personal blog, updated a chapter for Figuring Out Self Publishing, and wrote a chapter for Just A Fate. My wolf fans are going to be very excited to get an update after I just took two weeks off to focus on Demon.

Also, my sister called me about half an hour before we got into Tucson and told me to reach under my seat. What? I had to wait until we arrived, I couldn’t find anything while driving. And in the parking lot of our hotel I reached down under my seat and discovered a hilarious little rubber duck dressed up as Elphaba from Wicked. So I took pictures of it here at the hotel, and fully intend to document Elducka’s journey across the country!

Elducka came with us to dinner and I took pictures and sent them to my sister. It was a sushi place, at which we were the only customers, but the dim sum we ordered was quite delicious. Elducka looked adorable with her green ducky face next to the Chinese broccoli dish.

Trip status: so far so good.