Writers of the Future workshop, day 1

I wanted to get some exercise before breakfast, so I set my travel alarm to 6 am, after setting the local time. I got up right away and went down to the exercise room (the hotel had two) and hit the stationary bike. I was watching coverage of the Olympics, and after about ten minutes I saw the clock on the wall and thought, gee, that's really far off. Then when I flipped to CNN, I saw the ticker on the bottom say 3:35 PST.
Huh?
Turns out my clock is atomic and automatically re-adjusted  the time to Eastern standard. You're not supposed to set the time, you set the time-zone.
I finished exercising and tried to get back to sleep, but this set the tone for the rest of the week  -- very little sleep each night, culminating  Saturday night, where I didn't go to bed at all, since I had an early morning flight.
The workshop started promptly at nine, but before that  I had a chance to discuss the reading assignment with my writing twin, Laura. We were given a book of writing essays by L. Ron Hubbard, and the assignment was to read one of them. The idea of a writing twin is to have one particular person to discuss the assignment, rather that trying to talk to everyone about them.
The workshop room was very helpfully stocked with coffee, and Dr Phil provided the chocolate. There were also WotF posters on the walls, to touch up the bland decorating.
Tim and KD started off with manuscript formating, and from there we covered  many writing topics over the course of the next couple of days. We also had guest lecturers, and our first was PatRothfuss .  Erin and I had lunch with him that day, and he was a great guy to meet (I knew I was going to like him, he had a Girl Genius book with him). Pat and the other guests, like SteveSavile , Eric Jame Stone, and Sean Williams were great to just hang out with, and we learned a lot about the publishing world and being a pro from them.
We had a full afternoon in the workshop, and then we all went to dinner across the street.
When we got back to the hotel, it turned out that most of the winners of the Illustrators of the future had arrived and were hanging out in the lobby, and all the writers and illustrators got to know each other. I met  RobertCastillio , who did the illustration for "Hangar Queen." He's a multi-talented artist, who does animated movies and storyboarding in addition to illustrations. Hopefully we'll work together again.
The rest of the evening was . . . you guessed it -- hanging out and talking late into the night.