The calendar’s been full with work travel that turned out to be personal. Most of the pictures above are from our Nashville trip to two writing conferences. When I go through the pictures on my phone, I can tell it wasn’t all about the conferences for me. It was about friends.
In the top right corner, you’ll see where I wrote this, on the sun porch at the Hotel Northampton in Massachusetts. I was there getting ready to lead workshops (Making the Complex Comprehensible) at the Independent System Operator, New England.
After I retired from college teaching, I grew my consulting work at a handful of ISOs (the people who run the U.S. electric grid), in California, Arkansas, and Massachusetts. I’ve been doing this for about fifteen years.
I run these workshops and one-on-one coaching sessions several times a year and have come to see the economists and engineers I work with in these places as friends, and their hometowns and hotels as familiar, lovely places to write my fiction.
One of the ISO writers said he could tell the influence runs both ways, that their electricity has gotten in me. He pointed out the first lines of my first novel, Copy Boy:
“You think you’re a body, but you’re not. That’s just the container you collect in. Your body’s a light bulb. If it burns out or breaks, the electricity’s still there—you’re still there, still you.”
And the first lines of my third novel, Poster Girl:
“She’d been told her body was a hymn, a flower, a poem. In the end, it was seven gallons of water in a leather pouch. A perfect conductor of electricity.”
He was right. They have gotten in me, like friends do.
As I’m finishing my work in progress this month, I can’t help wanting to get a little electricity onto the first page, as an Easter Egg for some of my friends.
The new book will be out in August 2025 and it will share many characters and settings from Copy Boy, Tomboy and Poster Girl . If you’d like to catch up on the backstories, consider downloadi ng the audiobooks.
I hope your friends are lending you power, too.
Best, Shelley
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