Whew! The Emerald City Writers’ Conference is over for one more year. After spending the past year working as the registration chair for the conference I can tell you one thing for sure: I will never again take a conference for granted. This conference was for 250 attendees and I was working my behind off for months gathering registration information, tracking meal choices, allergies, editor and agent requests, costs, payments, emails, badge names, raffle ticket orders, etc. And then I was responsible for printing badges, meal cards, allergy cards, labels, and assembling everything into registration packets. I can only imagine the amount of work involved for larger conferences. Huge kudos to Lesa Dragon and the rest of the 2009 ECWC conference committee!

Because I was so wiped out from the conference I was eagerly looking forward to the following weekend when I planned a weekend getaway with my husband to celebrate our wedding anniversary in downtown Seattle. It started great, with doughnuts at Lola (Heavenly! Served with mascarpone cheese and fresh marionberry jam) and dinner at Assaggio (I had eggplant parmesan that was perfection on a plate and has since created a craving I need to satisfy soon!). And then the sickness hit. Rather than dining out, shopping, and hitting a comedy club or the theater, we called room service and laid in bed most of the weekend – and not in a good way.

So now that those two weekends are over (thankfully) I can turn my attention back to writing and submitting. And pumpkin patches and trick-or-treating and roasting turkey and eventually Jingle Bells and Dear Santa letters. The year is going to be over soon and I have big goals to accomplish first. I need to get my latest book, The Truth About Dares, sent out to the professionals who’ve requested it, and queries sent to others. I need to start plotting my next book and start writing. Lots to do.

What about you? What are you working on right now? How do you juggle all the demands and surprises of life?