Hmm, being in the desert might help you out if you've got any desert scenes in your book. Looking at the colour of the sky at sunrise/sunset, the shadows, types of rocks, insects and all that crap, could lend some extra realism to your work.

Unless of course you have no deserts. But then you could always put one in somewhere...

 

I can't believe that you would be away on Holiday without your Misses...especially on Her B-day. That is a very bad thing for a would be Mr. to be doing. She must be a bit upset.

 

Yahoo maps returns a distance of about 433 miles and a time of 6.5 hours. Just a pleasant afternoon drive. :P

Hubby and I have been all over those roads from Sierras to the deserts, and it's really not as bad as the numbers sound. Depends on how fast you drive the freeway sections, for one thing, haha. And how much you like to drive for another.

@ polyester -- I think they've been together long enough to weather such a thing. o.0

 

your lady didn't go with you? and you did not spend her birthday with her?

I sense trouble in paradise.

 

Ironically, there were desert travel scenes in 2 earlier chapters, and I got most of my imagery and ideas for them from previous trips to DV. the desert in the book is very cold and barren and frigid though, not the usual "fry an egg on the ground" thing you see in movies/fiction.

But yeah, when I go back over those sections during the rewrite, and add in more description and sense of place and such, I should have some fresh visions and memories in my head to work in.

As for Malaya's birthday, neither she nor I are that sticky about the dates of such things. Neither of us have ever celebrated our birthdays to any great extent, and we've never been that fussed about the date. I usually had to work on that day in the past, and would therefore put off any sort of "get together with parents" event until a few days later. Malaya wasn't bothered that I was away until the day after the date. It's just a date, after all; the sentiment is mostly the same the day after, especially since she worked late Monday and ate dinner with her parents. Tuesday was her day off, so we would probably have done all of the same celebration stuff that day anyway.