I seem to have the urge to publish today.

I just realized I have not been talking much about what we are up to with the novels. If you have been reading this blog regularly you will know that we have all our rights back to the first novel in our Caribbean saga. Now everything is under our control.

Having found our way through the maze involved in becoming publishers we now have a publish date for our enhanced second edition in January 2006. Actually the book is already printed, copies are on pallets at Book Clearing House and we are ready to roll full tilt on the marketing.

Speaking of "roll" the reviews are rolling in and we are very proud about what is being said about the first book in the series. The reviewers love A Dream Across Time.

We are still placing ads in magazines and on numerous websites. After working my way through the online sites that would review romances I ran into a wall. Once again the books about publishing were not much help. I could not conceivably find the media contacts or find the time to relentlessly pursue them. So, we hired a publicist. Publicists have exactly what authors need. They are crazed and relentless. I am expecting something of a break between Thanksgiving and Christmas since nobody works during the holidays. They are online doing their shopping at work. At least that is how it seems. But I suspect such is not the case with publicists who are no doubt plotting a strategic attack which will break out in January.

This second edition has new material in it and if you want a hint about the second book you will find the prologue and the first chapter in the second edition of A Dream Across Time. The second book is called A Circle of Dreams and will be out in the spring. It is presently getting a final run through by our editor. We should have a finalized cover shortly. Then, right after the first of the year, I want to get PODs so I can begin to gather reviews. This time the back cover of A Circle of Dreams is going to have our best reviews on the back and inside.

We have learned a lot and are ready to roll on marketing book two which is going to be much easier to do. With book 2 essentially on the shelf, we are working on book 3. Mala and I recently went over the outline again and she resumed writing the first draft which is coming along. Book 3 does not have a title yet but it is going to be fun because Jamie's amazing daughters are now young adults and are loose on the world. Look out!

One of the problems we have is that we have too many stories knocking around in our heads. We have to focus, focus, focus. Speaking of focus, I better focus on something else and stop running at the mouth. Ciao.

For Much More Come visit us at www.annierogers.com

Column 11 -Goal, Motivation, Conflict and Creativity
Early on we heard that it was crucial in the construction of a novel to be clear about and pay attention to goal, motivation and conflict. Without these components one could not conceivably write a workable and plausible story. Given who we are, we needed to speculate first and do some exploration before we were able to refine the story and the elements.

That meant that when Roger got to the point of working out the details for an outline it seemed time to clearly define goal, motivation and conflict so that we could stay on a stable track. But something interesting happened. The story and all creativity died when we tried to refine it along those specific lines.

Obviously something was wrong. We went back to look at the fundamental assumptions which were driving our story. Jamie was the obvious focus of this evaluation because she was so central. We determined that Jamie had a primary goal as A Dream Across Time began. She wanted a good marital relationship, a home, and children some day. Absolutely mindboggling! How unique!

What motivated her in these unique goals? The need for love, security and fulfillment. Amazing. It seems we all shared those needs. It appeared to us there was nothing of interest so far.

We turned to conflict. Aha! Paydirt! As her marriage fell apart, should Jamie as a married woman violate her values and pursue a man who was engaged to someone else? Should she take the "safe" path and turn tail and run back to the States? Those were at least two of the conflicts she faced. Surely if you have read A Dream Across Time you can name several others.

Enter Stephen King to the rescue. He’s modestly well known as a writer and shared not just his history but his thoughts about writing in his book On Writing. We highly recommend it. It’s quite a good book. We didn’t realize that he wrote all that scarey stuff while stoned on a variety of substances. He wasn’t recommending that budding writers fill themselves with all manner of substances but his story was very interesting.
What he had to share about writing was important and some of what he said jumped out at us.

For one he said, "Write the book you need to write." Sage advise in our estimate. You can’t write something that is just not in you and if you try to follow fads it probably is not going to work out so well. If the current big craze is about women with zits we would not recommend you try your hand at such a story. It may not be your story but also by the time you have it ready the craze will have moved on to something like women who date men with flat feet. Then you will again be left flat footed yourself.

But there was something else he said that we found even more fascinating. He talked about his writing being a matter of unearthing the fossil. That perception hit us right between the eyes. That is exactly what it has felt like to us. We constantly have the feeling that we know where it is all going and that we are unearthing it. We even find that as we are working on later story lines that we have "inadvertently" put in something in an earlier work which is the basis for the later one. How did we know to do that? Because it is part of the fossil that is being unearthed. There were times when it was absolutely creepy. In fact, as we work our way through the saga, it seems that the saga has chosen us, not the other way around.

It is not unusual for us to find a character walking in the door but we did not expect that the story for book two would walk in the door and that we had included key elements in the first book Again, it felt like it was always there.

What does our experience and Stephen King’s advise have to do with goal, motivation and conflict? If you are writing the book you need to write and are unearthing a fossil, then it is not going to do much good to try to develop the book as a formula. For many of us the process is intuitive and we will have all the key elements in the story as the fossil is revealed. Most elements of a good story can be found in mythology which is one part of why it feels like a fossil.

In the end the wonder of a story is in the art of telling and the elaboration. Boy meets girl is one of the most wonderful experiences of life and the story stands to be told in many ways. How it is told is what engages us and enriches our lives.

For Much More Come Visit Us at www.annierogers.com

Here it is folks. Small publishers (self publishers included) are big business. I have been steadily hearing and perceiving this information but someone recently sent me this short and coherent summary of BISG's conclusions. Interesting reading about the wave of the future. Enjoy.

Since 1975 the Book Industry Standard Group (BISG) has been at the forefront producing quality research about the publishing industry. Since many consider the business model of the industry to be antiquated and inadequate, this is not an easy job to accomplish. However, they have had a number of successes in moving this gnarly behemoth from the 18th and 19th centuries toward the 20th with perhaps a glimpse of the 21st in its future. In addition to studying expected subjects such as consumer book-buying habits and independent publishers, BSIG has ....In "Under the Radar," a recent BSIG study detailing books published "under the radar" via small publishing companies, often referred to as regional and "niche" publishers, is a myth-buster and should be of interest to many authors.
Conventional wisdom decreed that these regional and niche publishers had limited sales and their efforts only accounted for a small piece of the publishing pie. Not so, says BSIG. The 63,000 small press publishers who report annual revenues of less than 50 million dollars generate $14.2 billion in aggregate sales. Within those sales, a small population of 3,600 publishers account for 11.5 billion of the total reported. In contrast the "big" traditional publishers tend to report between $23.7 billion and $28.5 billion in sales--depending on sources.
Here's a couple more things from the BSIG report to mull over:- small and midsize publishers have been multiplying, and often- prospering, while the largest publishing companies have been- consolidating.- small and midsize publishers have been using routes to readers beyond- the bookstore world, and often selling more books outside trade- channels than within them, while the largest booksellers have been- claiming more of the traditional bookstore market. More specifically,- the study findings indicate that small and midsize publishers do more- than 50% of their business outside book-trade channels and inside- sales channels designed mainly to serve other industries that the- book industry has not monitored.
However you frame the size of the pie, the report makes it clear that these so-called "niche" publishers have moved into the billion-dollar arena and are clearly worth considering when an author begins to consider the many roads to publishing that exist within and without the industry.= - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - =
For Much More Come Visit Us at www.annierogers.com

I am really into publishing now. I think I will publish another restaurant review. Just to help out.
In case you don't know the Mid Shore of Maryland's Eastern Shore it has a lot of good restaurants in the St. Michaels and Easton area. Many are quite toney.

But if you want some really good local seafood there is a place which I suspect tourists often don't find.
It is a place without pretentions. Old style maple furniture with wooden booths and great food. The staff is really friendly and seem to be on happy pills. They have one of the hardest working busboys I have ever seen.
The place is called Chesapeake Landing. After leaving Easton you go through St. Michaels and it is about three miles outside of town on the left as you go toward Tilghman Island.

Crab salad, lobster, not to forget crabs etc. Of yes, they serve outstanding cakes made by the ladies of Smith Island which none of us should probably be eating because they are so good they must be bad for you.
So, if you are passing through or willing to go out of your way a little, drop into our local place, Chesapeake Landing, for some really good seafood.

For Much More Come Visit Us at www.annierogers.com

Column 10 - How does this writing team work?
It begins with the fact that we love a project! And that means a project we can do together. Tearing out a wall at home, splitting firewood or writing books. They all qualify. Picking ticks off the dogs at night does not qualify as a project so Roger gets to do that.

Then, some years back we were sitting on a plane heading for St. Lucia. Roger was reading what he considered to be a not very good book and asked Mala if the author sold lots of books. Her answer was fundamentally, "gobs". We sighted a project in the making and decided we could do better.

The question became a matter of what kind of a book would we like to write. What might hold our interest and be fun. Being mental health people we thought about psychological thrillers but neither of us felt much enthusiasm for the genre. We shared our enthusiasm for marital partnership and family. The obvious choice was some form of mainstream romance. Bodice rippers were out of the question.

Roger was soon making a family oriented trip to California and went to Barnes and Noble to load up on romances to further his education on the plane trip. People in the romance section of the bookstore eyed him suspiciously as he sat on the floor browsing through books. He selected a wide variety of types of books including bodice rippers which he read on the plane although he got more strange looks. By the time he got back as far as Kansas City on the return trip he ran screaming to a store for a thriller.

Then began the process of focusing on the story line, setting, and characters. We wanted an "exotic" setting. St. Lucia was perfect since we had already "researched" it. We had some clear preferences about characters. No abusive types. No victims. Our heroine had to be gutsy and capable. And especially no poor communicators. How could a couple of mental health people bear to write about people who could not communicate? It could be done but we didn’t want to do it. And so on until we had our ideas roughed out.
Until that point there wasn’t much of an issue related to partnership. Beating your gums and speculating is not challenging especially as far as partnership is concerned. The next step was actualization and this is where our experience together really counted. Creative endeavors involve putting egos on the line and all kinds of ego related issues. It’s probably an excellent way to kill off a relationship or a marriage. So, we called on our considerable experience of working together.

Instinctively we sought out our own spheres of influence in the project. Writing is not just writing. There are many components and plenty of work to go around. We knew from the outset that there needed to be one voice in the writing and it didn’t take much to determine that the voice needed to be Mala’s. Roger tends to write what we call "Germanic prose". That means long run on sentences with the verb stuck on the end. Mala has good instincts and produces something much more interesting and readable.

But Roger is an organizer and good at pulling together the overall framework or template for the work. So, after they work up the ideas together then it is his job to begin the formulation of an outline. Neither of us believes in the creative muse who alights on your shoulder and helps you pour forth the work whole cloth. So, an outline is produced and together we refine it.

Mala can begin writing with little threat of writer’s cramp. Having an outline also keeps her from working herself into an impossible corner in a story. She knows at least generally where she is going.
Then she passes the work back to Roger who begins something of an editing process. He does some rewriting, looks at issues of continuity and consistency, evaluates the work in terms of the outline, etc.
Part way through it is usually clear that the outline is not working as well as it did at the beginning and the revision of the outline begins. Together they rework the direction of the story and the development of the characters.

In short, there is a fairly stable direction, delineation of areas of responsibility and a pretty good chance of not ending up in divorce court or being at each others throats. Key elements involve recognizing that people have different talents and strengths. There is not just one way to tell a story or one solution to a problem. Compromise helps and willingness to let go of a pet idea. But above all, we love a project and we love a project we can do together.

For Much More Come Visit Us at www.annierogers.com

The self publishing marketing conference run by the Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN) in Denver was a goldmine.

We flew out on Northwest and, in spite of their recent troubles, everything went well. There was a little irritability on the part of some staff but it was understandable. We learned that many of them will be starting over at the bottom of the pay scale with much reduced benefits because of the bankruptcy changes. We wish them well. It must be difficult.

As I said in an earlier post we decided to rent a car since we were going to Aspen and definitely were not going to pay $765 round trip per person from Denver. So we drove to the Marriott South Denver early in the evening. A really nice facility with extremely helpful staff. There was always someone around with a smile and an offer to help. It was quite apparent that they had taken a great deal of trouble to train their staff very well. Very attractive facility and, while I'm usually not very enthusiastic about restaurants in hotels, their restaurant was quite good. A top notch facility.

Then, of course, there was the reason we were there. The SPAN conference. It was focused on marketing and they put us through our paces as they did theirs. The experience ranged from validation of our efforts to new important information.

Some of the presentations permitted me to do a checklist of what I had accomplished and what I had yet to do. I learned that I had done a lot right. Very validating. And then I could develop a new list of what needed to be done yet.

An example of the useful information was how to get in touch with other established authors to seek testimonials. We now have the contact information so we can get to the staff of the people we would like comments from. Want a comment from a celebrity? We have the right phone number for SAG (Screen Actors Guild). I also have a list of websites for all kinds of information I had wanted or had been wondering about.

The presenters were the important people in the self publishing field. John Kremer. Marilyn Ross etc. We were also entertained and energized by people like Rick Frishman who is really good at promotions. I also must mention SPAN's executive director, Scott Flora. He kept us organized and ON TIME. Thanks for the "on time" Scott. If we were fifteen minutes late, we missed fifteen minutes of content. Things really hummed thanks to Scott.

In our breakouts we did things like practice our "elevator speeches". That's where you have a surprise chance to give a quick spiel to someone about your book. Wow, was that hard. We found we had good elevator speeches for our prior nonfiction titles and completely fumbled a speech for our novel. Have to work on that. Boy, do we have to work on that.

It is much more difficult to get publicity for a novel than for nonfiction works. It was impressed on us that we had to have a good hook and things like tips to get media coverage. We spent time working up good copy for the media and it is already paying off. A conference like this helps the author focus on the crucial elements of marketing and promotions.

We also had the opportunity to interface with some suppliers. And, I actually now have the name and e-mail address of a rep for Amazon. There is now a real person I can contact with questions. No more canned responses from the help section which usually leaves me screaming HELP! The contact and information helps me smooth my way. It's always nice to have a face attached to a name.

I learned how active self publishing people are becoming. The publishing field is definitely changing and I am now over reservations about proclaiming that we are self publishing. WE ARE SELF PUBLISHING! Getting noticed is still difficult but that is nothing new. The important part is that the process is now under our control.

Shortly I will put together an outline of what I have learned about the changes in the field and what it means. It has been a revelation. I have said previously that it is best to take a look at self publishing and marketing before you begin writing your opus or great American novel. Unless you simply want to stack up manuscripts in your closet, you better know what you are up against. Read about the realities before you write and then decide if you are up to the total effort. There are two of us which helps a lot. Getting the second book out there is going to be much easier now that we have been through the process once.

All in all the SPAN conferences are not to be missed.

For Much More Come Visit Us at www.annierogers.com

I think I'm beginning to get it. If you are self publishing you are wearing so many different hats. I got two separate requests for material today from our publicist. It finally sunk in that much of what is produced for publicity is very different from writing novels. Duh! I had to get the stuff out the door pronto because of deadlines involving the people who need it. It is not possible to turn it around, do drafts and look for writing at the level of a novel. I'll just have to be clear about which hat I am wearing.

For Much More Come Visit Us at www.annierogers.com

Some things seem to be universal. Like fifteen year olds. We were on the metro in Rome a couple of years ago when two girls got on. The tilt of their noses and the sneers on their mouths told me they were fifteen. They spoke Italian, of course, but they could just as well have been speaking English.

But what amazes me is that fifteen year olds seem not to exist here in St. Michaels. They must be sent away or there is something in the water. The kids here are polite, do not sneer and talk to you as if you were family. Our weekend guests this weekend had the same sense of amazement.

I'll keep on checking and looking under rocks. There must be something I'm missing.

What I did miss this weekend was the Waterfowl Festival in Easton. I stayed in the office working on our self publishing empire. I thought, why would I want to hear a bunch of people calling ducks and selling carved ducks? My wife reported back. Once again the unexpected happened. Master carvers were gathered together in the old armory in Easton and evidently had produced astounding art. She reported a full range of sculptures of many Chesapeake related things some of which were decoys but of amazing detail and quality. I'll have to go next year. I did kind of want to see the dogs going through their paces as well.

For Much More Come Visit Us at www.annierogers.com

One of the benefits of self publishing is that you are your own boss. So, this last week my wife, Mala, and I decided to run away from home and take a nostalgic trip "down the ocean". That's what people say around here when they are going to the shore.

First, for those of you who are not familiar with Maryland, I need to give you a geography lesson. Maryland is that strangely shaped state which gave up part of its territory to form DC. Someone carved Delaware out of it and took a dull knife and tried to cut another section off but couldn't quite pull it off. That left us with the Chesapeake Bay. The ocean side of Maryland is called the Eastern Shore. We used to live on the Western Shore which we thought was Maryland. You only find out there is a Western Shore when you move to the Eastern Shore. You get to the Eastern Shore by crossing the magical Bay Bridge which takes you from the fourth largest metropolitan area in the country to the land of watermen, yachts and sunbathing at the beach.
Anyway we set off across the Eastern Shore to revisit the areas where we spent summer vacations with our kids. Since we now live on the Eastern Shore we went straight across country. Sorry folks. The roads were great but all we could think was that agribusiness must own most of that area and pays miserable wages. An awful lot of abandoned and run down houses. We looked forward to getting to the shore.

We had to make a pit stop and spotted a Burger King. But we couldn't find the road into it so we parked by a dumpster in the Comcast Cable lot and worked our way to it through the brush. Inside only the men's room was working and it was occupied by a woman. The urinal had been torn out which I guess made it unisex. We bought some fries and a drink and fled.

Next stop was Rehobeth Beach which we remembered as a toney community by the sea. Well, it used to be. Now it features the most incredible array of shopping outlet malls ringed by condos. I guess people go down the ocean now and shop. There were a few nice areas but we fled on south. Dewey Beach was really familiar. So was Bethany Beach. And Fenwick Island was still there.
But it was Ocean City where we used to hang out with the kids for a week or two. We had a favorite little funky cottage which at the time had cable TV. We didn't have cable at home. Our reception was so bad that some nights we watdh TV in black and white. At the beach we had the luxury of one whole channel of HBO. So we watched the same few movies endlessly when we weren't visiting water slides and building sand castles at low tide. And at night there were glow lights to be hurled into the air.

This was just a day trip so we planned to have a little lunch at a nice place overlooking the ocean. Nothing was open. Most of the Subways were even closed. The place was a ghost town. The weather was still warm so I thought there would be some activity. Nothing.

There was something of a time warp atmosphere. We recognized many of the hotels and there seemed to have been a little more building on bayside. But everything was very much the same. We finally bagged the idea of the charming little place by the sea for lunch and settled on a pizza and sub place in a mall. It had the advantage of being open. It was the kind of a place where all the men had tattooes and the women had no eyelashes. I got a meatball sub which was amazingly greasy. I thought my paper plate had a green design on it until I noticed the green was the table. The grease had dissolved the plate and I had eaten part of it. Not a fantasy fulfilled.

Back on the road we gave up on our history. We stopped briefly to go out on the beach. Tis the season for beach replenishment. Beep, beep, beep. Clank, clank, boom. They were pumping sand and bulldozing. We walked around for awhile and returned to the car.

Sometimes memories are best left fond and alone. It didn't change the memories of those days and it was amazing to see a beach town changed so little. You really can't go home again. That's out of our system.

So I'm back dealing with Amazon, Baker and Taylor and the rest of our future. I guess checking back on our past was a part of walking away from our former life. In the space of a year we have closed our travel business, given up our villa in St. Lucia, sold our lovely two hundred year old stone home on a picturesque creek and moved to a new world we love. All of it without a quiver. I'm increasingly thinking we are strange. So many changes in just one year and there has been no upheaval.

With our lives unencumbered we can simply focus on our writing and related activities. Who says you can't seize the opportunity to reinvent yourself and start a new life in your sixties. And with the publishing in our own hands, we are firmly in control of our destiny.

For Much More Come Visit Us at www.annierogers.com

Here is another review from our trip to Aspen mentioned in an earlier posting.

When eating out I'm often satsified when I get "food". I don't consider myself fussy. But from time to time I get a really good meal. Imagine my surprise when in Aspen we had two really, really good meals.

The second meal was at Takah Sushi.

I'm ordinarily not a big fan of Japanese fare probably because I had never been to a top notch Japanese restaurant. Imagine finding one in Aspen, Colorado.

The restaurant itself is charming, crisply designed and understated oriental elegance. We were at once comfortable and felt welcomed by a young but obviously experienced staff. It being a quiet fall evening they even shared their good fortune with us. One of their habituees usually brings his own wine and in this instance he left most of his bottle of $300 champagne. The staff shared it with us. Since that is beyond what we usually spend on any wine (way beyond), it was quite a treat.

I have a bias about restaurant food. It isn't always essential but I love getting lots of little dishes. Like Tapas at a spanish place in Hermosa Beach or, in this instance, Takah Sushi. My Japanese does not exist and I can't possibly remember the array of dishes we had but nothing disappointed. We tried a variety of dishes including sashami and sushi. Everything got rave reviews from our party.

We took our leisure over the meal and the evening wore on. It turns out that the owner usually goes home about 8 and leaves the staff totally in charge. Then a younger dining crowd moves in, the lights dim and the music changes. At that point the music becomes way cool and the ambience quite special.
All in all another very lovely dining experience in Aspen. Takah Sushi is not to be missed.

For Much More Come Visit Us at www.annierogers.com

Column 9 -
Taylor, Clarisse and Barbara
Let’s take a look at three of the minor characters and see what it is about their backgrounds that made them react as they did.

Taylor Whitcomb-
Taylor was conceived of as a woman from old Northeast money. As such she moves in a rarefied atmosphere where people are highly privileged. There are relatively few families in such circles and new blood is rare.
Andre would have been intriguing to her. A breath of fresh air. He was an exotic, handsome man who was making his mark in the world of investment banking. Suddenly there was a new face in her world. A world which could have been quite predictable and boring to her. She found him virtually irresistible and fell in love.

But then she had to confront the reality of St. Lucia and the fact that Andre was thoroughly imbued with his island origins. No matter that he could move smoothly through the upper echelons of New York. It became clear that Andre wanted his base to be a home on a breezy hill in St. Lucia, not a dramatic apartment overlooking Central Park. And for Taylor there was the issue of the children she saw in her future. She would have already picked out the proper schools for them and to have them grow up on an island and go off to boarding school someday would not have been in her plans.

And, then, of course, there was Jamie. She could see the spark between Jamie and Andre and the fact that Jamie was able to adapt to island life.

Taylor came to understand that Andre would never give up where he came from and, in the end, she could not give up where she came from. Not being prone to live on hope and fantasy, Taylor faced facts. Her head came to rule her heart. Andre could be a friend but not a husband.

Clarisse Demontagne-
Clarisse was dealt some hard blows in life. She lost her parents at an early age and it had devastating effects on her.

When children face a personal tragedy they cannot explain, it is not uncommon for them to explain the event negatively in terms of themselves. All too often they see the event as indicative of some failure on their part. In Clarisse’s eyes the death of her parents was a punishment she deserved.

Then came the tragedy of her daughter, Lilabet. Illness, institutionalization and finally death. Could this again have been an indication to her that she deserved punishment. In the face of these blows she retreated from her children and her marriage. Her depression, regret and guilt would have only intensified. All she had left was the preservation of the family heritage and assets.

That is, until beautiful Jamie came along. The lovely daughter she might have had. The events with Jamie and who she proved to be represented a last chance for Clarisse. It would have been a formidable act of will for her to rise to the occasion. But she took the opportunity fate had offered her and seized it so she could re-enter her life and the lives of her family.

Barbara Carey-
Jamie could not have been more fortunate. Right in the middle of an island filled with pitfalls she found a woman who was the salt of the earth. What are the odds of finding such a benevolent and dedicated guide on a small tropical island?

Barbara comes from Baltimore, a.k.a. Balmur, Murilun to the initiated. You couldn’t want a better grounded and loyal friend. Again and again she came to Jamie’s rescue with sound advise and support.
While Bertille was bringing guidance from the "spirit" world, Barbara was bringing guidance from the "real" world. Lucky Jamie to have two such dedicated guides coming into her life.

For Much More Come Visit Us at www.annierogers.com

Travel is such fun! Siiigh. I'm giving away my age but I remember when we used to get dressed up to go on a plane. The terminals were uncrowded, everyone was courteous and it did not feel like a cattle call. But then life moved on and now travel includes the threat of terrorism. Terror in the good old days was a bumpy plane ride and the possible threat of having to use a barf bag.

One never knows what the adventure will be. We left for the airport innocently to head out to Denver. Nearing BWI airport all traffic stopped. From the driver of the bus bringing us from the long term parking we learned there was a vehicle fire at the terminal proper. No problem. We would get out and hoof it. We knew the terminal was just over the hill.

Cresting the hill we saw fire engines blocking the road as well as state police cars but we went ahead figuring we could walk into the terminal anyway. No such luck. The police were clear that we were not coming through and shouted for us to move back. We overheard a couple of men near us saying that if they went over the hill nearby they could make it to the parking garage and into the terminal. One of them threw his luggage over a small wall and started running up the grassy hill. A cop on a bicycle zipped up and ran after him waving his arms and shouting.

Now more and more people were cresting the hill. Hope on their faces, the would be vacationers came and the determined business travelers. More and more of them were expecting to take the inititative so they did not miss their flight. But the police were adamant. They shouted, their faces red at the challenge to their authority. Travelers fled around the sides running like a herd of cats. The police were furious. We retired to a bus to wait it out. Two words came to my mind. "Police riot". The officers were angry and the only way they could stem the tide was with violence which I didn't particularly want to experience. It seemed unlikely but it was clear that the public was having none of their restraint and they were breaking through and around the police lines.

The burned out car appeared on a truck and was taken away. The police retired and a tide of vehicles and people dragging their possessions hit the terminal simultaneously to once again fill the lines at check-in.

The basic policy in Maryland appears to be that when there is a crisis they simply stop everything with no contingency plans. The public is told nothing.

In this age of terror the police obviously had no viable plan for closing off the terminal. They simply expected to be in charge which is a naive assumption in America. They could have remained in charge by simply getting information to the bus drivers that the problem would be cleared in 5 to 10 minutes. And they could have told this to the vanguard aiming to reach the terminal. We would have been satisfied and turned back. But they relied totally on brute authority which did not work. So much for the planning of our authorites years into the age of terror.

For Much More Come Visit Us at www.annierogers.com