Saturday, February 13, 2016

i'll show you what it feels like now i'm on the outside

The conference is over, and I'm simultaneously extremely eager to get back to my real life and extremely desirous of another week on the beach. Sadly, I'm not going to get another week on the beach, so I'll have to settle for real life - but I have tomorrow in Hawaii, so I'm going to try to make the most of it (and by that I mean burn the hell out of myself).

Today, though, was a delightful end to the conference. At 7:35 I was still in bed, but Anne texted me to say she'd decided to go to the 8am meeting, so I threw on some pants and some mascara and joined her. It was a roundtable with a movie producer who did things like 'The Bourne Identity' and 'Pulp Fiction' (I may have mentioned him on Wednesday, but that feels like forever ago, so I don't know), and while I have no movies to pitch at the moment, it was still v. interesting to talk to him. Then I skipped the rest of the morning stuff in favor of having breakfast and working for a couple of hours - I have so so much that I'm thinking about, and I needed some alone time to process it and start to pull everything into some semblance of order (which I wasn't successful with, but I need more than a couple of hours for that).

But as I was finishing breakfast, some impromptu lunch plans materialized - which meant I switched tables in the same restaurant and had a 'lunch' that consisted of a mai tai and a bunch of nachos that I stole from Anne. Then we all went to a final workshop on advertising options beyond Facebook, which was basically a whirlwind tour of the entire internet. And I am reminded again of how useful my old AdWords experience would probably be to my current career if I actually took time to refresh/relearn it and implement it, so that's probably priority two for this year (after priority one, which is write some fucking books).

By the end, though, I was beyond done, so I adjourned to my room for some quiet time. This turned into not-so-quiet time because I brought Anne with me (she had checked out this morning and put her stuff in my room, since she was leaving tonight), and we ended up sitting on the lanai and sweating nearly to death and talking for a couple of hours about what we intend to do and what our goals are for the next few months. We're in somewhat similar situations, so it helps to brainstorm with her and see what we can test out at our level (since strategies that work for someone with thirty books might not work for someone with five).

And then I took a quick shower, and Anne and I met Barbara and Christie for the final dinner of the conference. We probably should have gone to the closing reception (and some of our party ended up feeling guilty enough to ditch us and go to that), but instead we went to the Mexican place some of us had gone to earlier in the week. And it was actually pretty perfect - it was nice to have a smaller group after a week of 7-10 person dinners, and we sat outside and drank margaritas and ate guacamole as the sun set. And there was so much to talk about in terms of what we've all learned and discussed and been thinking about that it was good to decompress in this group.

When we got back to the hotel, we sat on the beach for half an hour so we could watch the Hilton's Friday night fireworks show, which was lovely (and far more impressive than we had thought it was last Friday, when we couldn't really see it and were only hearing it from the place where we were having dinner). And then I said goodbye to Barbara (who I'll see Wednesday anyway) and Christie (who I might see tomorrow), and then Anne got her stuff from my room and went to the airport, and I was suddenly thrust into silence and solitude. So I spent the first three hours of downtime that I've had in awhile messing around with my website and upgrading my Wordpress installation and installing a Facebook tracking pixel and making sure my Google Analytics was properly configured, etc., etc. Clearly I am feeling #inittowinit, and I don't want to lose momentum (even though I really need some sleep).

Speaking of, it's time for bed - tomorrow I'm determined to get some time by the pool sans laptop, since Sunday is soon enough to spend the whole day working. Goodnight!

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