International Women's Day

On Thursday this week it is international Women's week. My daughter's school, which is a grade 5-8 French immersion school, put on an event today which brought in a variety of women to talk about their careers. The teacher's involved put in a phenomenal amount of work organizing the event. They had over 30 speakers and likely over 300 kids to schedule into time slots to view the speakers of their choice, in a similar fashion to how concurrent sessions are run at conferences.

I volunteered and subsequently was asked to be one of the speakers. I was terrified. I teach adults, not kids and middle school is well known for being the toughest audience possible.  The video above is what I did for my presentation.  I didn't feel they would be terribly interested in hearing much about my job teaching research methods and writing (given my own students are often not terribly interested in hearing about research methods and writing), so I created a presentation to talk about how difficult it can be to figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life.

And the kids were great. I talked about what it is like to try and figure out a career when you decide that what you really want to do with your life simply isn't realistic or viable. This is exactly what I had to do in my early 20's when I figured I could never be a writer.

And what made me most proud was that my own daughter wanted to come and see her mother speak.

If you watch, please enjoy the presentation. To keep it short, there is no voice over so feel free to ask any questions you want.

So, Save Me

So on February 29th, even though I'd likely been ready for weeks, I hit the publish button on my book. The various stories on how this came about can be found here, here, here, and here.  The Amazon.com folk, I guess because February 29th is only a fake day, have seen fit to change my publication date to February 28th.... so be it.

So the book is available for sale at this link. It has been priced at $2.99. That is actually higher than I wanted to price it but it was the lowest I was allowed to price it if I wanted to maintain any shred of worldwide copyright on the thing.

And no, for the time being, (and to be honest, likely forever) it is not available in paperback which thankfully for me means my parents will continue to be unlikely to ever read it.

It should be easily downloadable through Amazon.com on any e-reader device -- All the Kindle readers, iPad (and even iPhone through the Kindle App) and Kobo. I am sure there are others out there. If you are a Kindle Owner's Select member, then the book is also available for free in the Kindle Lending Library.

If you do not have an e-reader device it can still be read from any computer. If you are a Mac user you simply have to go to the Mac App store, search "Kindle" and download the Kindle App. Purchase the book from Amazon.com and it should download directly to your computer.

If you are a PC person, instructions on how to obtain e-books is here.

And one final request..... if you read it and you like it, please write a pleasant review. I'll owe you one.