At every conference I’ve been to—well, at least the national ones—they suggest that attendees send thank yous to faculty and staff with whom they interacted. I think that’s a good idea, and have done so after prior conferences. For the Write-To-Publish Conference, the organizers made this easy by providing a sheet that had all faculty and staff listed, including e-mail addresses.

Now, I admit to in the past never having been a hundred percent faithful in this. I always started the process with good intentions, but then trailed off as life and other conference assimilation activities got in the way. I generally did the most important thank yous first, and never made it to completion.

Not so this time. I suppose my computer woes, and not being able to begin work on the various writing pieces that will be part of conference follow-up, gave me the time and focus to write all the e-mail thank yous. I finished that process Wednesday night. By my count it was twenty-two e-mails. A few of these were to fellow attendees who asked to see some of my works, or who might be interested in a collaboration.

So this is a good feeling. None of these e-mails were submittals of material requested by agents or editors. That comes later—hopefully not too much later.

Why do this? Not to curry favor. It’s a simple matter of kindness and professionalism. I have done that from time to time after engineering conferences. I suspect the organizers of any conference, who have just been through a stressful period or preparation and then the actual carrying out of the conference. They know all the things that went wrong: the faculty member whose plane was late and so they needed a ride from the airport and still missed a class or appointments; the credit card processing machine that broke down at the conference bookstore; the construction in progress at the conference facility that caused a slightly different foot traffic pattern to be needed every day; etc. I suspect a little thank you goes a long way for them.