Post-conference brain

Just came back from a wonderful weekend in Rochester at Ruth Thaler-Carter's annual "Communication Central" conference. It's small and intimate (this time ca. 50 people, including about 10 speakers and only about 8 sessions), but that's one of its charms: it's tiring because of all the mental energy expended chatting with really smart and really interesting people, but not exhausting like those bigger conferences where you're constantly wading through crowds and trying to fit in a dozen sessions each day to get your money's worth. Plus, Ruth is the Bestest Host Ever, and takes really good care of her guests.

All of the sessions I attended were good, but I came back with a 5-week (if I'm lucky and industrious) list of things to do, listed here in decreasing order of the number of things the speakers inspired me to do:

• Alysson Machate's talk on self-publishing left me with the longest list of things to do to get my self-publishing endeavors in shape. None of my omissions are fatal, but there are so many of them that I've got my work cut out for me.


• Erin Brenner and Janice Campbell inspired me to get back into social media again and start keeping my network up to date. This blog will hopefully become a hub for those efforts, but I need to start using Facebook and LinkedIn more effectively too. I've resolved to try to update this blog every weekend, plus as inspiration strikes, but we'll see how that works out.


• Ellen Koronet inspired a satori moment in one of her exercises to help us find out what inspires our creativity. My choice of options in an early exercise led to the recognition that a formidably large number of things excite or interest me -- most things, really -- and I immediately want to share that excitement with everyone. This can lead to much running off at the mouth, a great many articles written for STC and techwr-l, and occasional glazed eyes from my audience. When I told this to Shoshanna, she gave me one of those spousal looks, of which the subtext was clearly "You took 51 years to figure that out?" Well... yes. There's a reason I chose Baldrick as my icon for this blog. Love, love, love Tony Robinson and need to see what other things he's done.


• Rich Adin injected his annual dose of hardheaded business logic into my subconscious. As a general rule, I've been giving my clients two options for billing: an hourly rate with a cap on the bill, with the cap based on 10+ years of records on my editing productivity in words per hour, or a per-word cost calculated on the same basis. As Rich notes, with unassailable logic, an hourly rate means that the faster I work, the less I earn. I'm mostly OK with that because my hourly rate is high and I earn as much as I need to earn by working this way, but switching to a per-word rate would unquestionably increase my income. Need to ponder that and decide whether my clients will buy into that approach.

The venue (the Rochester Plaza Hotel) was somewhat shopworn, but cozy and the staff were lovely. I managed to fit in a couple hours on the treadmill before dinner. The only thing I really didn't like about it was the coffee, which was uniformly bad -- undrinkably bad most of the time. Like, dishwater bad, except washing a well-used coffee mug in the sink would have produced tastier dishwater. (The local Tim Horton's franchise wasn't open when I had time to go in search of the good stuff. One of the things I love about being a speaker at a conference is that if you do your job right, you inspire a lot of people to come talk with you. I inspired a lot of people to come talk with me. The only downside is less time to wander.) In any event, the post-traumatic coffee syndrome is undoubtedly why I woke this morning to Clapton's "Cocaine" running through my head, but with a subtle change in the lyrics:

If you wanna hang out you've got to take her out; caffeine.
If you wanna get down, down on the ground; caffeine.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; caffeine.

If you got bad news, you wanna kick them blues; caffeine.
When your day is done and you wanna run; caffeine.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; caffeine.

If your thing is gone and you wanna ride on; caffeine.
Don't forget this fact, you can't get it back; caffeine.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; caffeine.

She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; caffeine.

I can soooooo hear Weird Al Yankovic singing this. And in the meantime, I really need to go in search of more coffee. To be continued, hopefully at more regular intervals. (The blog, that is. Also the coffee. It's a living.)