New England Crime Bake
This conference took place in Dedham, Massachusetts November 11 - 13. The guest of honor was William Martin, the author of Back Bay, City of Dreams, Bound for Gold, Citizen Washington, and Cape Cod. There were about 300 attendees who participated in about twenty different sessions. Most of them were panel discussions among over sixty panelists.
There were a series of Master Classes on topics such as "The Dos and Don'ts of working with book bloggers", "First Line, First Paragraph, First Page" and "The Art of the Twist".
There was also a series of sessions for interacting with editors and agents including sessions on "Practice your pitch", "First Page Critique", "Query Letter", and "One-on-one pitch sessions". These are wonderful opportunities to get in front of experienced literary agents not only to get their input on your writing but also to meet them face-to face. Trying to query an agent by email or snail-mail is a frustrating and time consuming job. I wasn't prepared to take advantage of this process, but I would consider this a primary value of attending one of these conferences.
My favorite sessions at this conference came on the last day with Dr. Katherine Ramsland (author of I Scream Man) called Reading the Crime Scene and a second session by Dr. Margaret Press called Naming the Dead: Five years in the Trenches of the DNA Doe Project. It is absolutely amazing the things that real people can do to each other.
People came to this conference from all across the country and when I asked them why the common line was, "It's the community." Building your tribe.
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Holiday Lighting
Ooh! Aah! All those twinkly, sparkling lights that illuminate the season. Hard to believe that people used to put burning candles on their holiday trees. Then there were strings of incandescent lights. There were ones that had little water tubes that would get hot enough for the water to bubble up inside of them. These things are still available.
Not exactly energy efficient. A 100-count string of incandescent mini lights runs at 40 watts, while a 70 count of 5mm wide angle LEDs is approximately 4.8 watts total. Neither of these strings of lights is going to break the bank on their own. After all, a door bell transformer sits waiting to be activated, sucking down a couple of watts. But there are many strings of lights, and they all add up.
If you want to see how much an electric device is costing you, get a Kill-A-Watt device. You can enter the cost per kWH in your area and see how much electicity a string of lights, a refrigerator, or a dehumidifier is using. You might be surprised. That old beer fridge in the basement might be hanging in there doing a great job, but it may have a major impact on the electric bill. Dehumidifiers are particularly power hungry. One house I worked on saved almost half the electric bill by simply reducing the set point on the dehumidifier. About 60% RH or half way down the dial is a reasonable setting.
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