Relationships…the day after tomorrow

Have I mentioned that I’m on the board of the local writers conference? It’s the first weekend in June at the Owyhee Plaza Hotel in downtown Boise.

Sherrilyn Kenyon is the guest of honor and we’ll also have special guests Tara Gavin (editor of the Harlequin Nocturne line) and Nephele Tempest (literary agent with the Knight Literary Agency).

We were going to have a rocking master class, but we just couldn’t make the numbers work to keep the conference affordable and pay our instructor enough to make it worth his time to leave LA for the weekend. But the master class will be back next year, and there’s plenty going on without it.

I’ll even be on a panel with a couple of other local writers discussing the digital publishing revolution.

Check out the website for more information: http://www.mayheminthegrove.com

Yesterday I started a new day job that pays quite a lot more than my old day job. I would have been quite happy to remain at my old day job because of the wonderful people I had worked with for more than four years, and because of the interesting work. Lots and lots of interesting work.

But I have a family to support, Spooky Man and the furry children, all…(gulp) five of them. So the raise was needed. The people at the new place are just as nice (although the majority of them are much younger than the old place, so I find myself on the senior end of the bell curve for once).

And the work is new and different — software rather than hardware. Help systems, user manuals and xml coding rather than gerber files and light electrical engineering.

Yes, I’m a technical sort of person, transitioning from nerdy to geeky. Spooky Man claims the difference is hardware (nerd) vs software (geek). I blame the technical nature on my mother; during the gas crises of the 1970s, I came home to find her distilling alcohol fuel on the kitchen stove more than once, comparing different still designs.

My father worked in communications (for a national forest–he made sure wildland firefighters could talk to each other no matter how rugged the terrain they were in), so it was up to my mother to provide balance. I never had a chance.

Alas, during the two-week transition period to the new job, I haven’t written a danged bit of fiction; apparently even good change uses a lot of coping beans. Speaking of change, if anyone cares, the new purse (really more of a bag than a purse — it’s not at all girly) is working great.

Time to get back to work.