Yet another busy week. At one point, I got completely confused about who was calling me and we talked at cross purposes for several minutes. But we got through it all. The most important activity of the week involved briefing a senior vice president of my company. He's mostly trying to figure out what all his fiefdoms do and what we should be doing. It went well and my boss was pleased that all of us in the group were able to answer everything we got asked without any hesitation. I was particularly glad I had gone to the trouble of looking up a particular report beforehand.
My spare time during the week included a bit more genealogical work. That's one of my more sporadic activities, but a cousin recently turned up a stash of old photos. Inscriptions on the backs of photos are a major source of information in my family. In this case, I volunteered to translate (from Russian) the inscription on the back of one photo. I did have to make a trip to the library to look up a few words I didn't know. The problem is that the inscription doesn't actually help any. We now know the photo is of Emmi Fainshtein, who shows up in other photos, but none of us have any idea who Emmi was. But all of this has my enthusiasm for genealogy stimulated, so I'm going to try a few other things to see what I can find out.
I didn't have time for any of that this weekend, though, because I went to Malice Domestic. This is a mystery convention, held every year in the D.C. area, and devoted to the traditional (cozy) mystery. I skipped out on Friday night because the hotel they use is not particularly convenient to the metro and, by the time I got home, I didn't feel particularly keen on driving back to Arlington. Both yesterday and today were filled with panels and it was sometimes difficult choosing which one to go to. When in doubt, I followed an author I'd at least heard of. The definite highlight was the Guest of Honor Interview. Since both Dorothy Cannell (the guest of honor) and Joan Hess (the interviewer) write very funny mysteries, it's not surprising that this was a lot of fun. The other particularly amusing panel was called "Before They Were Authors" and included not just Dorothy Cannell and Joan Hess again, but also Charlaine Harris, Parnell Hall, and Edward Marston. The latter was particularly witty, but I'm still not particularly inclined to read any of his books since I rarely like historicals. He has at least one other series (under another name I've forgotten) but it isn't as if golf is a major interest of mine either. The most disappointing session I went to was the Lifetime Achievement Interview. I like Marian Babson's books, but she wasn't particularly lively, and I didn't think that Carol Nelson Douglas asked particularly insightful questions. As for the other panels (including those I went to today), all of them were at least reasonably interesting. One thing I noticed was that the panel moderators had very different ideas of what their role was. One talked way too much about her own books (though, to be fair, one of the panel members had dropped out so she may have just felt she needed to fill time), while a couple of the others didn't talk about their own work at all.
I was reasonably restrained and didn't buy a lot of books, though I did pick up a few used ones I'd been looking for and a few other odds and ends that would be hard to find. I also had various random conversations with other attendees and will note two things there. One is that women who do needlework all find one another at any event. So, should you ever need a conversation starter, whipping out a bit of needlepoint is not a terrible idea. The other is that one of the universal subjects of readers is the stupid mistakes authors make. The part I find amusing about this is that the things that are obvious signs of laziness to one reader are completely missed by others. Finally, while I claim I'm not planning to write a mystery, I got at least two ideas for novels and one for what would probably work better as a series of short stories. None of those ideas were actually triggered by anything anybody said at any of the panels or any of the random conversations I had, but the infinite back burners of the mind work in mysterious ways. I'm not likely to actually make executing any of these ideas a high priority in the near future, though.
Copyright 2004 Miriam H. Nadel