For the Locals

Here's something to do in March: go to the Green Valley Book Fair.

These are remainder books, and many of them. The book fair is north of Staunton. Be prepared to spend the day. And your money.

Since you're up that way, drive a little further north to the Dayton Farmer's Market. This is an Amish market full of lots of goodies - sitty around stuff, candy, fresh meats, all kinds of things. Definitely worth checking out while you're there.

If you're coming from Roanoke, either on the way up or on the way back, check out The Cheese Shop in Stuarts Draft (some of these goodies are available at the Dayton Farmer's Market, too). I go here to buy some of the best cinnamon you've ever tasted, along with other spices. The prices are unbeatable.

I plan to make this trip in either March or May. Enjoy!

TV: Celine Dion

Last night I went to bed with a book and the TV on for background noise, like I generally do when my husband is working.

CBS had a special - Celine Dion. I like her music but own none of her work.

From the first song, the book soon lay forgotten beside me. I had no idea Celine Dion was such a compelling performer. I was impressed.

What I liked about it was she was so personable and comfortable on the stage. It was like watching an old friend. I really enjoyed her song with Will. I. Am; I thought that was exceptional, and her rendition of the Beatle's "Something" with Joe Walsh was extraordinary.

The hour went by very quickly. We need more shows like this, and less reality TV.

Valentine's 13

I could do 13 reasons why I love my husband, but I have several entries about why I love him. Today I thought I'd celebrate my friends.

So, 13 reasons why I love my friends (not necessarily in order of importance)...

1. They enrich my life. They do this by making me think, my making me love, by making me care.

2. They make me laugh. Laughter is really the best way to spend an hour, I have to say. I love making my friends laugh, too. What can be better than bringing a little fun into someone's heart?

3. They hear me out. When you've got a problem or a worry, then it's friends to the rescue. Your husband can only listen to it so much, after all.

4. Who else would I eat lunch with?

5. They give me their honest opinions. Thankfully, if I am messing up big time, they care enough to tell me. When my friends say, "You'd better stop and think about that," I try to heed that as the warning it is.

6. They give good advice. From what doctor to see to what I should do about a specific incident, I can count on hearing good words from my friends.

7. They will sit with me when I cry. My friends will not leave me to drown in my own tears. Thankfully I don't have to ask them to pull me from the waters very often.

8. They make me feel needed. I am always happy to help out if a friend needs a hand. Usually I just listen or sit with them if they cry (which again does not happen very often). I think it is very necessary for someone to feel needed in a relationship, to feel like they're giving back. I mean, isn't that point?

9. They give good hugs. There are few things as warming as the hug of a good friend. Hugs are about the best things ever.

10. They are patient with me. I know I have whined about the same thing a thousand times. And every time they listen.

11. My friends don't need explanations. If I do something really stupid, they simply accept it for what it is, and we move on.

12. My friends honor me by letting me be their friend and granting me time in their lives. Their time for me is indeed a most valuable gift.

13. Here are some quotes about friendship:

Friendship make prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC), On Friendship, 44 B.C.

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613 - 1680)

Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), The Soul of Man under Socialism (1881)

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Pudd'nhead Wilson

The only thing that lasts longer than a friend's love is the stupidity that keeps us from knowing any better.
Randy K. Milholland, Something Positive Comic, 09-07-06

Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.
Seneca (5 BC - 65 AD)

Seated Dancer

(For an image, click here.)

Seated Dancer

(From: "Seated Dancer" charcoal & pastel on paper by Edgar Degas, late 1870's.)

Something about her hand
highlights her defiance.
This woman sits with pale orange arms,
smiles cool while green shadowed
ghosts of confusion
skirt disproportional eyes
painted seductively dark.

Her fault, the performance.
Though she uses her body proudly
her reactions are over-rehearsed.
A quivering voice forces
nervous naysayers to leave
her arena not knowing
her finish met great applause.

Her box of jewels enthralls her
improperly conceals sweltering ice
and her sunglasses make light
much harder to see.
She'd had jewels, had rights,
knew where to stop at a just agreement
but surprise, her gambling,
compulsive as granite clinging
to ground, systematically
sought the unfamiliar.

Leads on wealth added costs
to fame, warmed her desire
for dollars and dimes.
Once the city thought her cold
ignored her foggy looks, the miles riding
and days in boats when the time was right.

What words in print describe
jukebox joints, an annual stop
in her only routine?
With taxes to pay, brandy, a cold river,
bring welcome relief.
Angels on pins
greet her with true
quotes, explain
that however wronged she feels
she still reached the wrong finale.



Note: This poem was written about 10 years ago.

When the Mountains Burn

View of a forest fire in Craig County, as seen from my front yard. Photo taken about 6:30 p.m. with a Nikon D40.

Windstorm

I have never seen such wind. I understand there are downed trees every where, lots of power outages. Worst of all, there are forest fires.

The wind is gusting at 60 mph and is expected to last into early tomorrow morning.

We have fence down, but that is nothing in the big picture. One of our neighbors has lost half of his roof - and his house is brand new!

My brother is without power and has been told he will be for DAYS.




Above: Leaves dance across the grass, moving faster than a cheetah.



Above: This is what my view of oak trees looked like yesterday morning.



Above: This is what it looked like at 3 p.m. Note the new addition of cedar where there used to be only grass...



Above: My little well house that covers my well pump has been blown over.



Above: Smoke rises from a forest fire out my front window. I believe that to be in Craig County.

Books: The Vineyard

The Vineyard
By Barbara Delinsky
Copyright 2000
Audiobook
Abridged
Read by Lauren Mufson

This is the story of Olivia Jones, only it starts out as the story of Natalie Seebring. If I had one quarrel with this, it is the point of view. The story would have been just fine if it had stayed with Olivia instead of hopping around at the beginning. It stayed with Olivia through most of the rest of the book, though it occasionally broke into omniscient point of view.

Anyway, Olivia repairs old photos for a living. She had a rough childhood. She has a daughter, Tess, who has dyslexia. She falls for the Seebring family via old photos she is restoring. When Natalie Seebring decides she wants to write a memoir, Olivia takes the job and moves to the vineyard in Rhode Island.

Natalie is 76 and is marrying a second time to 80-year-old Carl, the former manager of the vineyard. Her two children disapprove; hence, the memoir. We learn about Natalie's upbringing and life in snippets; we learn a lot of Olivia's heartbreaks and then watch her fall in love with Simon, the current vineyard manager and Carl's son.

No mystery, really, just good sentences telling a nice story. A nice little romance.

2.5 stars

Books: Pen Pals

Pen Pals
By Olivia Goldsmith
Read by Joyce Bean
Abridged

Martha Stewart goes to jail. Well, not really. Jennifer, a major player on Wall Street, goes to jail for insider trading that she didn't do - she is taking the fall for the firm.

She was supposed to get off with a slap on the wrist but instead pulled jail time.

The jail is going private. Jennifer gets wind of it and manages to end up owning the company that now runs the jail.

Lots of interesting characters. The book is told in multiple points of view, mostly via the warden and numerous prisoners.


3 stars

Thursday Thirteen

1. Time slips away.

2. When I get up every morning, I have a cup of tea. I put the microwave on for 2 minutes, 15 seconds, to heat the water.

3. In that short time, I can empty and load the dishwasher.

4. Or I can put on my shoes and socks.

5. It seems to me that those two activities should not take the same amount of time, but they do. Emptying the dishwasher sounds like it should take 5 or 10 minutes.

6. It takes me 4 minutes to get in my car and drive to the end of my (very long) driveway for the mail.

7. In 4 minutes I can have a microwave dinner ready if I'm eating something I really should not be eating.

8. It takes me 20 minutes to walk what I can drive in 4. That's because I have to stop halfway up the hill and rest.

9. Some days I can write an entire article in a half hour.

10. Yesterday I spend all day trying to write an article and accomplished next to nothing. Not even the first sentence (which is always the hardest).

11. I have a clock with an alligator face on it above my desk; my closest friend gave it to me for Christmas one year. It actually goes "tick tock."

12. I also have the clock on the computer, a watch on my wrist, two clocks in the bedroom, and five in the kitchen (if you count the clocks on the microwave and stove).

13. Time really is relative, fleeting and all the other stuff people say about it. Mostly there just isn't enough of it.

The Funnies

I learned to read when I was three years old.

My parents used to tell me this, and my earliest memories of books and stories indicate I was quite young indeed. I remember my uncle, who was five years older, telling me I could not read. I may have been four or five.

You just memorized the book, he declared. I challenged him to bring me something I had never read. He brought home The Cat in the Hat from his school library. I sat and read it to him.

No one questioned my ability to read from that day on.

Long before I started elementary school, I was reading the Roanoke Times. I started with the comics. I remember sitting on my grandmother's lap and sounding out the words as I read Blondie, Snuffy Smith, and Prince Valiant. Yes, I have been reading Prince Valiant for as long as I can remember. I still read it every Sunday.

I don't know how much I actually comprehended, but I must have enjoyed it. I still do. I have missed maybe 30 days of comic-reading in my lifetime.

Before I was 9, I was reading comic books. My grandfather, who lived in Salem, would pay the four of us (my two young uncles and my brother and me) to help him mow the lawn, and every Saturday we'd trek to the Orange Market for a soda, a candy bar, and a comic book, all of which cost about 50 cents (or less).

I was a Marvel Comics reader and I devoured Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, The Black Widow, Spiderman, and Captain America. I read DC Comics, too, but with not as much gusto. In DC Comics I read mostly Wonder Woman, Batman and Justice League comics.

I also read Richie Rich occasionally. He was not a favorite but I'd read him when I was bored.

We tossed our comics into a huge box (it once contained a washing machine, I think) in my grandparent's basement. We must have had thousands of them, because the four of us bought different comics every week and swapped them around. The box went out in the flood waters of 1972 or 1979; I'm not sure which year. It was a small fortune in paper at that time.

I do not read comic books anymore, although I went through a spell of reading them about eight years ago. But I'd been away from them for so long I found it hard to rekindle my interest in those characters.

I still read the comic strips in the newpaper every day. I turn to them every morning before redirecting my attention to the rest of the paper. I don't read every strip - I always try a new comic for several months but if it doesn't grow on me, I stop reading it. Presently there are four of the daily comic strips being printed in The Times that I do not read.

Funky Winkerbean has long been a staple. This comic has undergone several transformations, the most recent last fall. The characters have aged 20 years now.

I am having trouble figuring out who is who in this new version of FW. I don't look forward to this comic strip like I once did. I may have to stop reading it even though I've read it for at least 20 years (or however long it's been carried by the paper).

Things change, I guess. Maybe I've grown older too and that's why Funky Winkerbean no longer makes me smile.

The Hill

Last week I drove to a dirt road that I once traveled on every day by bus. I had not been on this particular road in more than 25 years.

During my travels as a child on the bus, this particular stretch of what was then an hour and a half ride brought me joy. This was because my dinosaur lived down this way.

The dinosaur was a fallen log trapped in a fence beside the road, and to my mind it looked like a dinosaur. The monster greeted me up until about the seventh grade, when my imagination failed and I couldn't find him anymore.

The last time I traveled this road was in 1983; my husband and I parked at the dead end one night for a long chat about our pending nuptials.

The road is no longer dirt; it's been hard surfaced. Houses have sprung up along the road, decapitating what used to be farmland.

There certainly was no dinosaur. Just a lot of houses.

I came to the dead end, which was at the foot of a steep hill. My destination was the house beyond. I drove a long way on a gravel driveway, winding around and then up and up a rather stiffly inclined path.

I rounded the corner to the house and the view opened up. The first thing I saw to my left was this:



To the casual observer it's a mountain with a grassy spot.



To me, it was the place I grew up. Yes, I rounded the corner and there was one of the fields my father owns. If you look closely you'll see the corner of the house he built in 1976 nestled in the woods.

I had never seen the hill from that angle, but I knew exactly where that grassy spot was. I confirmed it with the homeowner when I gestured toward the view and nonchalantly asked if that field wasn't over on a particular road.

This is the field where my brother and I played. We chased cows, picked wild strawberries, ran up and down like wild things until we collapsed panting in chairs on the back deck. I once lay alone on top of that hill and watched the sky all night, waiting for shooting stars.

I have not been back since July 2000. My mother died a month later.

My father and I have been estranged since that time. I do not regret it. But sometimes it is a steep hill to climb.

Changing of the Guard

After you've watched out a certain window for as long as I have, you eventually begin to notice patterns.

Turkeys, for instance, only visit the oak trees when it is going to rain or has rained. I have no idea why.

So they came this afternoon.



Deer are out at all hours; it's a myth that they only eat at night. If they are hungry they will eat in the middle of the day.

They will even join the turkeys and not shy away when the flash on the camera accidentally goes off.



The deer is my birth totem; I relate well to the curious and shy creature. They are keen observers; they see me long before I think they should.

Turkeys? Do I relate to them? Not so much in my youth but now that I am older, maybe a little wiser, I think I relate better. Turkeys relate to the Mother Earth, the third eye, the harvest and to sacrifice. I used to never see turkeys; now I see them all the time. I think there is a message there for me in that.





Maybe I am a mix? My shadow self, my older self exhibiting perhaps the strength and abilities of the turkey, without sacrificing the courage and gentleness of the deer?

Too Much Stuff

I want to direct you to The Story of Stuff. This is a 20 minute film about ... all the junk we acquire.

It's about all of the stuff you have around you. It's about my computer and your chair and the books I read. It's about your house and my clothes and the cars we drive.

We have too much stuff, I think. I have spent a bit of time in recent years attempting to rid myself of some of the stuff I have thoughtlessly accumulated. Most of it I was sorry I bought; some of it I don't even know how I obtained. Or why, for that matter.

Stuff collects dirt, wastes money that might be put to better use, wastes time, energy, and resources. Sometimes I look at all the "sitty-around" stuff I have in my house and wonder why I need it. I really *don't* need to collect Department 56 figures and houses. Would my life be incomplete without that collection? Probably not.

I have no idea what resources are wasted in making such things. All of this stuff ... we can live without it. Can't we? If we're not careful one day we might have to.

You can read an article about The Story of Stuff and how it came to be here if you want.

Also, I had a bit of trouble with the video loading; I'm on a DSL connection. In case it takes a long time for you, too.

After the Storm

About 3 p.m., sun broke out and sky turned blue.



Ice began to melt and fog danced across the hayfield.




I grabbed the camera. Amazingly it felt quite warm to me as I stood in my yard surrounded by ice. All around it sounded like a downpour as the water dripped from trees and pine needles.



The reflections were such that I could scarcely see. I raised the camera and started shooting, first into the fog, then into the sun, trying to hit the blue sky as the light danced a wiley jig across the frozen limbs of oak, pine and maple.



I am pretty sure that somewhere in that majesty, there were fairies.

Books: Child of the Prophecy

Child of the Prophecy
by Juliet Marillier
Copyright 2002
596 pages

I can't recall the last time a book brought tears to my eyes.

This one did.

This is the last book in a the Sevenwaters trilogy. The first was Daughter of the Forest; the second was Son of the Shadows.

This last book features Fainne, a lost daughter of Sevenwaters. Of the three heroines of these three books, I disliked Fainne the most. She did not have the will or the strength of character of the first two books.

Yet her redemption at the end was strong enough that when she received her "punishment" I was quite moved. She did not deserve what lay on those two pages, although the ending made it much more palatable.

It was a suitable and satisfactory ending to this series of books.

These books delve into Celtic lore; they are full of myth, magic and mystery. They are set in a time when humanity actually cared about the earth and understood how central the world was to the art of being human. Humans were of the earth and not separate from it, and I love this series for setting that out.

4 stars

Ice Storm

As promised, I woke to ice and rain this morning. Fortunately yesterday I had enough sense to cancel several things I had scheduled today. I am not a drive-in-the-ice kind of girl anymore. I even have been too skittish to attempt to get the newspaper from the box. But then my driveway is about 1/4 mile long.



The above is my rose bush, taken with a flash in the wee hours. Note how green the branches are. I don't think the plant has ever really gone dormant for the season.



This is a cedar in my front yard. I took the photo from the front porch, where I was safe from the rain and falling icicles.



This is the tree in the back yard. The power has blinked only once so far. I am quite glad and a little amazed.



This is the forest out the back door. It is a very dreary day, with no sun bouncing off the ice diamonds to make things sparkling.

Love, Love Me Do

Colleen at Loose Leaf Notes tagged me for this meme. Hers is, as usual, very heartfelt and comforting. Check it out.

So here are some things I love and hate. I tried not to think about them too much.

I love to eat: chocolate. I love the creamy texture of it, the taste of it, and the way it makes me feel. I love it when it melts in my mouth and makes me tingle. A good chocolate bar on a bad day can cure pretty much anything. Chocolate makes me want to dance around the room with every bite.

I hate to eat: my fingers. I have always been a nail biter and it's a habit that I have managed to stop for a year. However, when I read I sometimes chew the skin around my nails. I do this unconsciously and am generally surprised by it.

I hate to go: to the city. Any time I have to drive into Roanoke I grow nervous. There is too much traffic, too much noise and too many people. I also am not a shopping fan, mostly, I think, for the same reasons. It's simply a much faster pace than the pace I live at, even if it is just 30 miles down the road.

I love to go: to the woods. Solitude, quiet, the whisper of the wind, the touch of the breeze, the dash of a deer, the chit of a squirrel. Is there anything at all to compare to sitting on a stump and watching an ant try to cart a leaf back to its hill? Can anything be better than watching ducks on the pond as they squawk and dive beneath water? Hearing a hawk scream as it catches a mouse? Smelling the earthy smell of loam and decay and new growth?

I love it when: my husband comes home from work. The house suddenly swells with the smell and sound of him. I hear his voice and melt all over. He grabs me in a huge hug; there is nowhere safer. He kisses me "hello" and "I missed you" and his eyes say, "I love you" and there we are, nearly 25 years later, still crazy in love.

I hate it when: my computer has hiccups, my car doesn't work, the can opener electric cord melts because it's too close to the toaster oven, the curling iron stays on instead of cutting off automatically, and the batteries die on my camera when I'm in the middle of taking the greatest shot in the world.

I love to see: blog comments in my e-mail and on my blog. It's like having a message on the answering machine - somebody was thinking of me. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy to know that someone was reading my work and cared enough to leave a note. Blogging has given me a whole new set of friends and acquaintances and I'm thankful for every one.

I hate to see: horror shows, movies full of blood and guts, and R (or X) -rated comedy. I am a P&Qs kind of girl - I like good clean fun, wholesome and hearty and at least slightly sanitized.

I love to hear: the telephone ring, a Melissa Etheridge or Sheryl Crow song on the radio, my husband's laughter, the silence of the forest, and my name on the lips of my closest friends.

I hate to hear: a forecast for strong winds. I don't mind cold and I don't mind heat, but I do mind wind. It tugs at your hair and gets in your ears and blows trash can lids across the field. A strong cold wind cuts straight into your bones, completely bypassing your skin, and you feel it all the way through. It also makes my ears hurt!

All done! Please leave a comment about what you love or don't love, if you're so inclined. If you do this meme, let me know and I'll drop by. I don't usually tag anyone, but I hope June, Ms. E., Jeff, or Becky will take a gander at this one if they like.

Manuscript Submissions

In a comment on this entry about a writer's conference I was asked about manuscript submissions.

I noted that there was no discussion at the conference about proper formatting. I said in my previous entry that manuscripts should be double spaced, have 1" margins all the way around, use good white clean crisp paper, and have boring fonts (Times Roman or Courier or Arial, generally) and use only one side of the paper.

That is for hard copy submissions. Many publications still request submissions by mail. Others ask for a hard copy along with the article (and/or digital photos) on a disk such as a CD. Some might ask you to e-mail the document and follow with a hard copy. There are as many ways of doing it as there are publications.

Even if a publisher will take a document over the Internet, it still must be formatted properly. That can take some finesse because every e-mail reader pulls things up differently.

The most important thing is to follow the directions in the writer's guidelines for the publication you are working with. If they say hard copy, send them hard copy. If they don't go into detail about margins in the document, then follow the standard above. If they say send a disk, send a disk. If they say submit by e-mail, do that. If they want something in .pdf or .rtf or .doc format, be sure that is what you send them.

By all means, be professional in what you do. These are business people and they are operating a business.

In Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write, Elizabeth Lyon states:

Be generous with your margins. ... Use 1" to 1.25" margin for all sides. It's standard to drop down six line spaces (or half an inch) before you begin your header.

She also notes that there is no longer two spaces after a period. This has been a difficult thing for me to overcome, because I was taught to use two spaces (I learned on a typewriter - remember those?). I think a lot of older folks (that makes me sound ancient, doesn't it) have trouble with this.

Moria Anderson Allen in her book Starting Your Career as a Freelance Writer has an entire chapter on formatting your manuscript.

For print manuscripts, she says:

Good paper (20-pound bond minimum, never erasable
Double spacing
1-inch margins all around (at least)
A clear, readable font
Paragraphs indicated by indents, not by an extra line space

She goes into great detail on formatting; it's probably the best chapter on this that I've ever read. She also goes into fonts and electronic submissions (which have their own set of rules).

I mention all of this because it is an important detail. It would be awful to have created a great work that never sees print simply because in the final phase of creation the writer is sloppy.

Lyon also says, "If you're rather be writing your book than editing for format, hire a perfectionist to edit it for you."

I think that might be me.

Self Publishing

June from Spatter commented on my last entry about the writer's conference and asked thusly:

But I am surprised that self publishing, etc wasn't discussed more. Was
this conference sponsored by traditional publishers?

Good comment. I have lots to say in response so I thought I'd do an entry about it.

I don't know who sponsored this conference, but it did lean toward traditional publishing. I was surprised at the lack of reference to self-publishing myself.

I have never self-published for myself, although I have helped local historical organizations with special self-published projects. I know many "traditional" writers who eschew self-publishing.

But I know a number of people who have self-published and been very happy with the results and with their sales efforts. I think self-publishing really depends on what you're writing and what you're doing it for. I see self-publishing as a trend that will continue and grow as traditional publishing (i.e., somebody pays you upfront for your efforts) continues to decline.

My main concern with the trend toward self-publishing is that I think it takes story away from the masses and hands it over to those who have the money to print a book. I realize it is not all that expensive to have a small first run, but even so it is more than many people can afford. I have seen prices and quotes ranging from $400 and up, by the way.

I am concerned about that aspect of it, because that takes story away from the people who need it most. It continues class division, too. So I hope that we always have a mixture of traditional publishing along with self-publishing, so that everyone at least has an opportunity.

By the same token, self-publishing gives life to works that otherwise would only see the inside of a drawer. Sometimes that isn't a good thing - some things don't deserve to be published. But many times good works are simply overlooked by the traditional publishing industry.

As a chapter in The ASJA Guide to Freelance Writing notes, the work of Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf and Ben Franklin saw the light of day because it was self-published.

Personally, I would self-publish if I thought I had something worthwhile. I have a bunch of poems I've considered self-publishing but I've never gotten beyond the "yikes, this would cost me $$$" phase in my research.

I also think very good things to self-publish are local histories, family genealogies, family memory books, regional photo books, etc. Not everything pertains to the entire nation, after all.

So those are my thoughts on self-publishing. Comments about the process, particularly from anyone who has actually done it for themselves, are welcome.

June also asked about manuscript submission formats. I'll address that in my next entry.

Roanoke Regional Writers Conference, Part II

Today was the writers conference. It lasted from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; I left at 4:15 p.m. I was (and am) very tired.

I greeted a lot of people I knew but hadn't seen in a long time. I was pleased about that. I saw again two fellow bloggers, Becky and Ms.E. Becky introduced me to a blogger at Smith Mountain Lake but unfortunately I didn't write down either the name of the person or the blog.

I knew five of the presenters - K.R., D.S., K.A., S.C., G.C. I also saw L. Adkins, who has published several books about hiking the Appalachian Trail. I interviewed him for an article about two years ago. He could have been a presenter himself.

A few other people I hadn't seen in a while were G.J., who is another freelance newspaper writer, and B.C. Also E.G., whom I knew from college.

A new person I met was Keith, who is a former editor of Omni magazine. Keith gave the lecture on blogging, which I unfortunately did not attend. At lunch he was very kind to my friend G.J., who is in her 60s and a little lacking in knowledgeable about things like blogs. She is, however, always willing to learn. I admire her for that.

I estimated the crowd at less than 100 but could be wrong. They had four classrooms going so I never saw everyone all together except for in the hallway, coming and going.

I haven't been to many writer's conferences lately so I don't have much to compare. The last one I attended was the Blue Ridge Writer's Conference at Roanoke College in about 1992. I have attended the Hollins Literary Festival since then, several times over, but since they don't call it a conference I don't think it counts.

Anyway, the good things about today's conference:

Networking

Seeing old friends and making new acquaintances

Hearing a few good talks. Sharon McCrumb's talk, which was the very last thing I attended, was worth the admission price all by itself, even if she did have a head cold.

A renewed determination to do something else with my work. In my spare time. Whenever that is.


The bad things:

There was a lot of noise bleed over from room to room; it was very distracting.

The lectures were only offered one time, so if there were two you wanted to go to at the same time, you were out of luck and had no chance to make it up.

The lectures were very much "old school" publishing. Aside from the blogging lecture, these talks were about publishing as it has been. I would have liked to have seen something about marketing yourself and your work and something about using the Internet to your advantage. I also would have liked to have seen something about research on the Internet, or maybe even "maximizing your Blackberry." Hearing about John Garner's book On Becoming a Novelist is certainly worthwhile, but then so is knowing how to find you what you want in a database.

And everyone takes for granted that people know how to format a manuscript. They talk about doing all the right things for a submission and neglect the very fine details - double space, 1" margins all the way around, use good white clean crisp paper, boring fonts (Times Roman or Courier or Arial, generally) and only one side of the paper. The old pros do this in their sleep, but I have seen manuscripts using both sides of the paper, single spaced, etc., etc. It's not that this is a hard thing; people just don't seem to know, and I suppose the lecturers just forget to mention it.

Lunch consisted of a wheat bread sandwich with cheese, lettuce, cucumber and sprouts. One of my lunch mates complained a lot about the sprouts. I didn't mind them but it was a lot of carbs.

I did not learn anything I didn't already know, but then I have been freelancing a long time. I am sure for many people much of the information was new.

All in all not a bad day, but it certainly made me tired!