My last wonderful week!

[Austin S. Camacho]

The highlight of my week was a complete surprise. When I went to speak at a meeting of Arlington Chapter of the Jaycees a vaguely familiar fellow sat beside me and shook my hand. After a shameful delay I realized he was my fraternity bother Mark Altman. In my own defense I haven't seen this guy in 34 years or so, and we’ve both changed a bit in that time. But he remembered way more about me than I would have expected, including the superhero-littered skyline mural we painted on the wall in The Executive Suite (the room I shared with 2 others in the Alpha Delta Phi house.) Mark’s doing some consultant work in my area for a while so we’ll see more of each other and be able to catch up on some old times.

Xaipe Mark. It has been a while.

That wasn’t all of my good news. I had a great time at the Bay to Ocean conference, as always, and my presentation on writing dialog was well received. Hard to believe this was my fifth visit there. What a fine bunch of folks that run that thing (Thanks Diane, Mala, Judy, Wilson, Laura, Roger, Carla, Ann, Bea, Jim, Linda, Bonna, Terry, Jeanne, Leslie, and especially Carolyn for making it the best conference, both for speakers and the attendees.

Also this week I wrote a guest blog for Leslie Pietrzy’s “Work in Progress” page - http://workinprogressinprogress.blogspot.com/2008/02/guest-in-progress-austin-s-camacho.html which she posted Thursday. It gave me a chance to defend genre fiction to my literary author friend, and she added some comments to round out the discussion. The result should be of interest, no matter what you like to read. It was popular enough to get picked up by other bloggers, like “1001 Things To Do Before I Die” - http://hot-explay.blogspot.com - another literary blog maintained by dinve (yes, that’s the correct spelling.)