My Weekend

Was up at 6am on Saturday to prep for the franchise convention. Headed down to the hotel and worked with our tech guys to synch up my asshatted computer with the projector so my PowerPoint presentation displayed correctly. Ran through a mock-up of the presentation with the slide transitions, then attended the general session, presented two 45-min sessions about our new intranet portal and its features, lunched, and presented two more 45-min sessions to another two groups of franchisees.

I had a guy come up to me at lunch and say, "You're one of the most incredibly confident, determined, passionate people your age I've ever met."

How this came across during a 45-minute presentation about our intranet portal, I don't know. I can turn on my funny, confident, outgoing self for short presentations, and I know that a lot of the love for my job, what I do, the free health insurance, my affection for the team I work with, came out during my talk.

"Well," I said. "It's not that complicated. I just know what I want."

"Exactly," he said. "You have no idea how rare that is. Most of us still have no idea."

And me? Man, I've worked hard to get to where I am, and I'm still just renting a room at my friends' place. I certainly have a lot right now, and I'm incredibly blessed and happy to be where I am, but I have a long way to go. And I know exactly where I'd like to be. Maybe that is pretty rare these days.

It was a really good convention, in any case. This company has a fantastic group of great franchisees. They were a lot of fun to talk to. I've done theater, and spoken at writing conventions before, so the actual doing wasn't tough: it was just all the buildup that was stressful. This week has been insane getting this convention put together. I had a blast, but was ready to collapse come 4pm. I didn't bother staying for dinner (our programming was done at 3:15; after that was general sessions led by the exec staff), and went home and put in some napping and movie watching time with the boyfriend.

Besides the convention, I've been putting together the synopsis for the third book in the God's War series, Babylon. It's why I was up until 11pm at the Books & Co. down the street on Friday, and perpetually sleep deprived this week. Convention madness + personal writing deadlines + addiction to boyfriend time = sleep deprivation.

Finished up the synopsis today and got it off to my agent (MY AGENT!!!!!) and started printing out the old synopses for my old series. I have stuff for The Dragon's War and Over Burning Cities that I'll be revising and putting back together again, writing up pitch paragraphs for the rest of the series, et al.

Things at work won't be as stressful this week, and I'm thinking of taking Friday off since I worked Saturday. This will give me some time to get my Ohio driver's license and maybe go to Columbus this weekend and hang out: me, the boyfriend, Steph, and the Old Man. Might be fun.

Yes, I'm busy. It's damn fine busy, but it explains the lack of posting. I'm going to need to find some kind of balance for all of this stuff pretty soon here. I think some weeks will just be easier than other.

Tra-la