Any of you Dear Readers who keep up with my http://typem4murder.blogspot.com blog entries know that we’ve had some excitement around the old homestead recently, involving the emergency room and a hospital stay for my dear spouse. I won’t bore you with the whole story again – you can read about it in my Oct. 10 Type M entry, if you’re interested. Suffice it to say that everything seems to be going well at the moment. There will be a bunch of tests at the end of this month, and I expect a bunch more medications after that.
The point of this reiteration is that all the unexpected activity has thrown a serious crimp into my plans to attend the Women Writing the West conference in San Antonio over the weekend of the 25th. I’ve spent the last day or two canceling flights and hotels and informing conference organizers that I won’t be there to participate on my historical mystery writers panel. Naturally, Don didn’t manage to have his little crisis before the deadline for a conference fee refund, but at least this didn’t happen the day I was supposed to leave, or even worse, while I was in San Antonio.
I’m sorry to miss the event. I like Women Writing the West. Like most authors, I belong to beaucoup writers’ associations, including Sisters in Crime (women mystery authors), Arizona Authors Association, Oklahoma Writers Federation, Mystery Writers of America, and probably another one or two I’m not thinking of. As you can see, the bigger and more influential of the above are groups specifically for mystery writers. Women Writing the West is a group of -you guessed it- Western women writers. I like to attend their conference because it’s a different group of writers than I usually hang out with. One problem authors often have is that they tend to go to conferences that strictly deal with their particular genre, and end up only knowing other writers of their own ilk. So who knows who is who (so to speak) among mystery authors? Other mystery authors, of course. Therefore, the problem becomes how to preach to someone other than the choir. When I went to last year’s WWW conference in Colorado Springs, I not only met many, many, successful authors whom I normally never would have crossed paths with, I gained a number of readers, as well as a bunch of new books for my “To Be Read” pile.
It would be nice to attend all kinds of meetings and conferences, and not just for writers of other genres than my own, but also non-literary events for people who might be interested in what I write about. But, alas, who can afford so much travel, not to mention time?
Speaking of which, I talked to my sister this morning, and she told me that she has a Facebook page. I have been avoiding going on to Facebook, because I really don’t look forward to spending even more time on line every day. I’m supposed to be writing a book, after all. However, I think the universe is conspiring to tell me that I’m going to have to hitch up my drawers and do it, because two hours after I spoke to Carol, I checked my email and saw that I have a Facebook invitation from a childhood friend! Oh, brave, new, internet world! I expect this thing will happen, Dear Readers, and when it does, I’ll let you know and you can all be my Friends.
October 17th, 2008
Sorry to hear about your husband’s illness. May his upcoming tests be encouraging to the max. I won’t be able to be at WWW in San Antonio, either. I still hope to catch your mystery writing workshop sometime. The Murder In The Grove conference, Boise, Idaho, would be perfect for me to get to. If you’re ever there, I hope to hear about it.