Writers

Off posting for a week and seem to be overwhelmed by work again. A couple of permanent custody cases coming up soon and just after that a client who didn't, stab her ex-husband at a seriously drunken party involving a couple of 17 year olds and significantly faulty memories decreased by alcohol and other things. There is no chance that this last case is going to do anything other than go to a jury trial. I got the client off probation last month early because she couldn't stop using. There is no way she will agree to go back on in some kind of a deal.

Today went to a writer's conference here in town. My wife had started this writers group about eight years ago and about three years ago they started to put on this conference. She decided that she didn't want to be in charge after the conference last year (too much politics and it interfered too much with her writing), but we still went today. It is kind of nice to go to one of these things when they are put on fairly well. And this one is put on quite well given that we are in a rather small city and pay the presenters no money.

The first year there was no money except the money we put in ourselves for our own registration. We discovered something very interesting: Writers (for the most part, not the big boys and girls, but those a little farther down the food chain) will travel quite a distance for free for a table to hustle their books from, throw in a free lunch and they are more than willing to talk for an hour about how it is done.

There isn't a lot of quality control, but some are very good. You can never tell before hand, last year the one with the biggest rep. was the weakest presenter.

One of the presenters today told my wife (who is very short and handicapped) that he hoped that she would meet some people here and possible she might even begin to try to write some little something. My wife has both solid aluminum crutches and a temper, I generally try to move out of the range of those things when discussions of this sort start. But for some reason she decided to respond with a: "Why, thank you kind sir, I shall do my best." I'm not sure the guy picked up on it, but I thought it was a remarkable show of restraint. Otherwise the thing went off without a hitch and a good time was had by all.