I had a mixed-reviews kind of weekend that was highlighted by friends visiting from Tacoma (hooray!). We had a great time strolling the brewery blocks in the Pearl, shopping, and visiting the rose garden. It was whirlwind, but a great Sunday. I am half-looking-forward-to, half-dreading this week as I have a work trip coming up on Wednesday where I head to Colorado for a night. I hate traveling more than quite possibly anything in the world, so I am not excited for that piece. I am excited to be going on my first work trip and getting back to Colorado.
I don't know if I have talked about this on the blog before, but I lived in Colorado for about a month and a half (is that living or is it an extended trip?) after graduating from college. I attended a certificate program at the University of Denver in publishing (books, magazines, etc.). I majored in English in college and one of the defining things about my entire life had been that I loved to write. Facing post-college job searches, I came to grips with the reality that I was never going to make it as a writer and I didn't want to try. So, I decided that the next best thing was to get into publishing. Constant contact with written material combined with marketing, sales, media, and a paycheck? Perfection.
The Denver program was fantastic in that I had an amazing summer learning about the publishing world, reading galleys, meeting industry contacts, proofing manuscripts, designing book covers and learning to copy and line edit. But above all, the course was about networking your way into an industry that was shrinking. And based primarily out of New York City. After a trip to NYC during a Spring break in college, I decided that the Met aside, the city wasn't for me. I couldn't take the sheer number of car horns I heard on a given day.
So when it came time to graduate from the program with an armful of business cards and just about 0 job opportunities at our final career fair, we were told that we needed to move, right now, to New York. Get an address, whatever way possible. And pound the pavement for internships or jobs that didn't pay enough to make that New York City rent go anywhere near far enough away from in apartment rats and bugs. This sounded so far out of my comfort zone that I threw in the towel and booked it back to the West Coast where I happily ended up finding my career. My book publishing dreams are pretty much all extinguished, but I think about publishing school very bittersweetly - the world that could have been if I'd had the ability to chase after that elusive career off in the big city. That sounds like a glamorous chick flick, but I'm pretty sure if I'd have gone down that route it'd have been a movie about a very ugly nervous breakdown.
Anyway, I am happy to be flying back into that gorgeous state that is Colorado. It should be fun to see the skyline again and think about that world of books once more.