Danny Tompkins Short Stories, family, Writing

Limited Writing Time

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This week looks to be a dud as far as writing goes. We have out-of-town family in-town. Not staying with us, but staying in the area and performing each night at the Country Gospel Music Association convention being held in Springdale. I believe the performances are each night from last night through Friday, and maybe some during the day on Saturday. We went last night, not getting home until almost midnight. The 5:45 AM alarm seemed kind of early this morning.

And actually, I didn’t get much writing done over the weekend. On Friday this illness that has beset me, be it Lyme disease or whatever it is, seemed to flare up a little. Saturday we went to see a matinée performance of the last Harry Potter movie, then shopping. I came home and felt totally wasted, perhaps the result of all the popcorn I ate. By Sunday afternoon I was better and was able to…

…format and upload “Mom’s Letter” to Smashwords. It was easier than expected. The Smashwords Style Guide is long, but as it turned out my MS Word file was mostly according to the style guide. Almost immediately I had a sale, and I’ve had the sample portion downloaded four other times. I like the statistics that Smashword gives; much nicer than Kindle. You can see more items, and have a better feel for what’s going on. That’s all on the page for the book if you are logged in as the author. Then there’s another stats page that gives even more information. As I say, very nice.

So, I don’t know if I’ll be going every night to the sing or not. I suspect so, in which case I’ll get little writing done this week. I’ll try to make a blog post or two, before work, on breaks, or on the noon hour.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Writing

“Send”

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I did it.

The agent I met with at the Write-To-Publish Conference last month said, “Send me your novel as it is, even unfinished, so I can evaluate it.” I didn’t quite do that. I’d written two chapters in the month before the conference, but had lost the file with the latest typed version. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about finding the lost file.

Being delayed in the finding and polishing, I decided to delay a sending little bit to add some more chapters, so as to get the book to the first plot point. That’s the point where the hero experiences the event that triggers him to go on with the quest. I finished to that point on Sunday, and have spent the last three days proof-reading and polishing. Those edits I completed tonight (bringing the word count to 21,200), saved the file with a new date. I had only to attach it to a simple e-mail to the agent and click “send”.

Fear entered in at that point. Fear of rejection? Fear of success? I don’t know. At our appointment at the conference, once the agent liked the concept of the book, she asked, “What kind of platform do you have?” “Platform” for a novelist means “ready-made audience.” What do I have? A blog with 14 followers and 350-450 page views per month, a new writer’s web site, a Facebook fan page with 6 followers, two self-published e-books with a total of 11 sales. A writers critique group of 6 regulars and 13 on the mailing list. In short, nothing.

This is a make or break time. Short of a financial windfall, I won’t be going to any more conferences, and almost no unknown novelists get discovered through the slush pile. My chances of being so discovered are quite low. So selling my book through a face-to-face meeting is probably my best shot. Since that might be my last face-to-face meeting with an agent, this is probably my last shot. Thus, clicking “send” carried a lot more weight that a simple mouse movement.

So I hesitated; re-read my e-mail and made a change or two; re-read some of a scene in the book but could find nothing I wanted to change. Finally I did it.  clicked “send”—and Yahoo e-mail said I had typed an invalid e-mail address. Ah hah! An omen! Or maybe a God-sent hesitation. Or maybe just a stupid typo. I fixed the typo and clicked “send” again before I could over think the hesitation.

So it’s gone, now sitting in the agent’s inbox, ready for her to open, read the simple e-mail, open the attachment, love the book, pick up the phone (or e-mail me) and say, “I love ! Let’s talk representation.”

Did I ever mention that my dreams are very, very big?

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Writing

Working the To-Do List

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It took me a couple of weeks after returning from the Write-To-Publish Conference to figure out what to do next. Well, not exactly. I knew the first this I had to do was to send thank you notes to the many people on the faculty, and a few fellow attendees, for the interactions we had. So that took first place on the to-do list. Next was to prepare the things I had to send, the materials requested by agents and editors I met with. Third would be to follow-up and send some of my works to fellow writers who asked to review them.

I have that to-do list somewhere, maybe in my yellow conference folder. If I recreated it now, without looking at it, I think this is what it had.

  • WTP Conference thank you notes
  • more work on Fifty Thousand Screaming People, then submit
  • a proposal to Timeless magazine for some genealogy articles [PARTIAL]
  • a proposal to Timeless magazine for a short story
  • a proposal to Wesleyan Publishing House for a series of books on John Wesley’s writings [SOME RESEARCH COMPLETE]
  • a proposal to SmallGroups.com for some small group studies [SOME RESEARCH COMPLETE]
  • submit some poetry to Advanced Christian Communicator magazine
  • a copy of Father Daughter Day to David and to Sally
  • a copy of Documenting America to Jim

That’s not too bad. I had sort of been bemoaning my lack of progress over the last couple of weeks, but when I list everything, and add it up, I have made some progress, despite taking a week off doing not much of anything, using my computer woes as an excuse.

This week I added about 8,000 words to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, bringing it to just over 21,100. More important than the specific word count is the place where I’m at. The last chapter added brought the book to the “first plot point”. As defined in a class on fiction writing that James Scott Bell taught, this is the event in the book that causes the hero to move out on the quest. Normally the event is at least partially caused by the hero himself—well, it doesn’t have to be, but it makes a better story if it’s his own doing that forces him on the quest.

In this case, the event is Ronny Thompson’s, pitching phenom with the Chicago Cubs, blow-up with his parents. He argues with his dad over farming vs baseball, and with his mom over family and small towns vs friends and the big city. He speaks harshly to his mom, who responds with her own anger, then Ronny leaves for spring training a week before pitchers and catchers are to report.

When I planned the book, I hadn’t quite worked out this plot point. As I added chapters and words this past week and weekend, it all kind of came together. I’ll re-read it tonight, and see if everything I’ve written makes sense, and look for the stray word, the unfinished sentence, the excessive modifier that all tend to make a first draft a first draft. I’ll fix those, then by mid-week I’ll fire it off to the agent that requested it.

Then, what next? If I work my to-do list, I’ll next complete the proposal for some genealogy articles and fire it off. I’ve already drafted a proposal; I just need to find it, polish it, probably run it by crit group tomorrow, and send it. Then, as time allows (since I don’t write in a vacuum but occasionally have to pay bills and update budget spreadsheets and deal with health insurance claims and help manage my mother-in-law’s retirement money), I’ll hop on the Wesleyan Pub House proposal.

To-do lists are great, aren’t they? It’s about time to re-make mine.

poetry, Writing

Thoughts Behind Rejection

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our son, Charles, will next Monday begin his professional career. Doctorate in hand, he begins his position as an associate administrator over admissions for the Pritzker Medical School of the University of Chicago. On a phone call this week we talked, not for the first time, about the job and what it entails. Some of it will involve recruiting trips, to various universities, to encourage potential medical students to apply to their school.

In the course of that conversation, he said that Pritzker accepts maybe 10 percent (I think that’s about right; don’t hold me to that number) of those who apply. For the U of C as a whole, there’s also many more applicants than positions. That caused me to ask what to me seemed to be an obvious question: “If you have more than enough applicants, why are you going out and recruiting?”

He explained that recruiting was for the purpose of getting more and more qualified candidates to apply—so that they can reject them. Actually, he didn’t say that. He said that universities, and professional schools such as the Pritzker, thrive in part on “exclusivity”. The more candidates they reject relative to the number of positions available, the more exclusive the school will appear, and the more better candidates will apply. They will always had a difficult time competing against the good medical schools such as Harvard’s, but exclusivity helps. If they can say, “Only 5 percent of those who apply to Pritzker are accepted,” that will look better than saying, “Only 25 percent of those who apply….”

I suppose that’s true. A med school candidate, planning on applying to Harvard and similar exclusive schools and thinking they can be one of the 1 or 2% who are accepted, might not apply to a Pritzker that accepts 25% of all applicants, but might apply to a Pritzker who accepts only 5%. So off the school goes to recruit. Get the better candidates to apply, accept the best among those, and hope that with each class you’ll have a better and better student body. Then, maybe at a point in the future, some of those applicants who are accepted to both Harvard and Pritzker will go to Pritzker

I wonder if writing is a little bit like that, or at least traditional publishing is. The rejection rate is sky-high for most things that a person would want to publish. An agent that is actively recruiting new clients might see 100 query letters and want to see a partial manuscript for only 5 or 10 of those. Of those 5 or 10, the agent might want to see 1 or 2 full manuscripts. Of those 2, an offer of representation might come to only one. At most one. The agent will most likely need many more than 100 queries to find that one writer he/she would want to represent. Yet, the agents invite queries to be sent, and attend conferences and workshops with the intent of recruiting new writers, hoping to find that one writer who can produce a mega-best-seller.

This isn’t really the same as the medical school analogy. In writing, it’s a buyers market. Too many writers chasing after too few publishing positions. In medical school, it’s a seller’s market where the best candidates and the best schools are concerned. I’m not quite sure how the bottom 95% of the candidates fit in, and I think my analogy breaks down.

Today I submitted three poems for possible publication. I submitted them to a small-ish periodical, one that I’ve read from time to time but don’t subscribe to. It’s a publication for writers and speakers. The have mostly prose, but publish some writing-related poetry. I met the poetry editor of this mag at the Write-T0-Publish Conference, and she suggested I submit some. This might be a better than 1 or 2% chance for garnering a publishing credit. Maybe it’s around 10 to 20%. A week or two ago I submitted a haiku to a group that’s putting an anthology together to help school libraries that were destroyed in the Joplin tornado. I think that one may have as much as a 25% chance of acceptance.

Clearly I’m not exclusively applying to the Pritzkers and Harvards of the writing world. I’ve been doing that for about eight years, and getting no where. I may be close with my baseball novel, but I may also be farther away than I thought. We’ll see.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, technology woes

File Lost and Found

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The writing life is like a man who didn’t back up his files every day to a consistent, safe place. Then one day his hard drive on his ancient computer began acting up. A repair shop was able to clone the drive, but the file, with 5,000 new words not contained on a manuscript, was not to be found. So the man asked the computer to do an heroic thing: Despite the slowness of the ancient processor and the drive clone, the computer was asked to search for all documents with a certain four letter string. Not knowing whether the computer had the umph needed for the task, the man started the search, went to his newer computer, and began again on those missing chapters from the older back-up file. Later, with a thousand words of dubious quality added, the man checked the old computer, and found it had identified six files with that string. One of the six files turned out to be the missing one, saved with the wrong date. Does not that man, when he has found the file, contact his friends and associates who read his blog and say, “Rejoice with me, for my file that was lost is now found. The work is there, and the first writing is better than the second.”

Yes, my lost file is found. This was my In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People file. About a week before we left for Chicago I took some pages I had written in manuscript and entered then in the computer. As will normally happen, I changed things as I typed along, and I went beyond where the manuscript had ended. I recalled that I had added two or three thousand words, but wasn’t sure how many. At the end of the session I saved the file, with a vague recollection I saved it to a wrong folder, but knew I’d remember that so didn’t re-save it to the right folder. Also, I didn’t do a poor man’s back-up by e-mailing it to my office. I think I was in a hurry that evening.

Back from the Write-To-Publish Conference, with an editor wanting the manuscript and a publisher also interested, I went to look for the file. Nothing. All the files with that name in the right folder were older. I though, Oh wait, I saved that to a wrong folder, but which one? I went through all the folders I might have been working in the day I typed that chapter. Nothing. Oh, I found a FTSP file in one of them, but it was also an older file.

Now, I typed this on our 2001 Dell, which has been my computer for at least the last six years. It has been slowly losing performance, and I knew I would have limited use of it. I was planning to move all my stuff to our 2009 Dell, since Lynda doesn’t use it any more. With no home network set up, I was going to do that through e-mails. But, two days before leaving for Chicago, the 2001 Dell gave me a blue-screen error, followed by a black-screen reboot, without rebooting. I dropped it at Computer Medic and went on the trip, telling them there was no hurry with it.

The medics took their time with it, and finally said the hard drive was dying, but that they thought they could clone it. Other projects pushed mine back, but they finally got to it, and I finally re-hooked-up the computer. It’s amazingly slow, much slower than it was with the original hard drive. So I was actually searching on the clone hard drive.

I searched and searched for that file, to no avail. It seemed to be gone. I began to wonder whether I had dreamed about typing that chapter rather than actually typing it. Finally, I decided to use the Windows Explorer search feature. I wasn’t sure if that old Dell could do the job. I searched for “FTSP” in file names only. It took literally twenty minutes for that poor computer to do the search, but came up with results as described in the first paragraph.

When I checked the original version against what I had typed that day, the original was much, much better. I’ve noticed this before on those few occasions when I started over due to something lost and later found. The original is always better. The found file actually had closer to three thousand words, in two chapters. Yesterday I added more than two thousand words to it, and the book stands a hair under 15,000.

Can 85,000 be more than two months away?

Writing

Working Through Adversity

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So I arrive at home last night, knowing I would have to fix supper, but I decided to sit a few minutes before starting it. I sat in my reading chair, leaned back, put my arms behind my head, and realized the air blowing on my arms from the AC duct was not as cold as it ought to be. I checked the thermostat/thermometer—it was 82 degrees with the thermostat set on 77. Some was amiss.

The inside air handling unit was working, but the outside compressor wasn’t. I checked everything I knew to check, and couldn’t find the problem. So I shut it off, we turned on some fans, I cooked supper, we ate, I went out and looked for ripe blackberries (finding none, the bushes nearest the house being either past prime or still red), and I headed to The Dungeon, with its coolness and Internet.

The coolness was nice, but the Internet was down. A call to Cox resulted in the message, “I see there’s a service outage in your area; technicians have been dispatched.” So, we went to The Dungeon, but watched an episode of Battlestar Gallactica instead. With an interruption for a long phone call, that brought us to 10:30 PM. By then the Internet was back, but that left too few hours to do much except check e-mail. No real time to do the writing tasks I had planned for the evening.

Which was too bad. I had a lengthy writing to-do list. I was going to go to the old computer, just back from the shop, and back-up recent work by e-mailing them to myself. Then I was going to go to the new computer and download those items (I’ve never been able to set up our home network) so I’d have them in three places, or five if you include the mail server and my hard drive at work. I was also going to begin the process of uploading my two e-books to SmashWords, which includes some exacting formatting. Couldn’t do the things I wanted to do, so didn’t do the others.

Today is looking better. The AC dude will be there sometime today, maybe before noon. The Internet was restored. Tonight looks to be an evening of accomplishment. As I’ve written before, however, it seems that whenever I begin to ratchet up my writing activities, adversity pays a visit. I went to the writing conference, and a two week dry time followed. I pull through that, and can’t do what I planned to do on the computer. I have a ton of personal items to attend to.

Last night I probably should have done some kind of writing on the computer or in manuscript. I could have worked on the next chapter of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, and have merged the files later. I could have worked on part of a subject that came to me over the last few days for inclusion in The Candy Store Generation, and merged the files later. I could have worked on the proposals for the John Wesley writing series and the genealogy article series, both of which have finally started to come together in my mind and are about ready for making tangible. But that wasn’t what I’d planned to do last night, and I just didn’t feel like changing my plans. Oh stubborn me.

Somehow I’ve got to find a way through adversity to productivity. To embrace flexibility a little more. To have some back-up tasks planned for those times when it just doesn’t work out to work on the urgent or the necessary. Hopefully I’ll get there.

self-publishing

I am my own Chief Marketing Officer

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Michael Hyatt, chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers, recently posted to his blog: Four Reasons Why You Must Take Responsibility for Your Own Marketing. The post has generated over 200 comments, including mine.

I want everyone to know that I embrace the concept that an author must participate, even lead, in their own marketing effort. That doesn’t mean I like it, or want to do it. But do it I will.

It’s difficult to lose the training of my upbringing. We were taught that blowing your own horn was a bad thing. “Don’t brag” was one way it was put. “He that exalts himself will be humbled” was how a Higher Power put it, and one of the few biblical things repeated in the family. Heck, in Miss Dudley’s class in 4th grade I was nominated for room president. I voted against myself, and Susan Ehrens won by one vote. Granted, 4th grade class president is not a position of immense importance, but hopefully you get the idea.

So how’s a body trained to be humble, to stay in the background, to let others call attention to you ever going to break through the marketing wall? Darned if I know. They say to start a blog. I did that in December 2007, and have achieved 14 followers and an average of 400 non-unique page views per month. Those are pretty poor number. Obviously I’m doing something wrong there.

They say to join Facebook and other social media. So I joined Facebook, and have a little over 100 friends. I started a Facebook fan page earlier this month. At least, I guess that’s what I started. Actually my son created it for me. I still haven’t figured out the difference between a Facebook account and a Facebook fan page. I have 6 people who “liked” my page—does that mean 6 fans? And, there’s a button for me to like it. Is it against my training to like my own page? What will that look like to others who check to see who the 6 7 are who like my page?

They say join Twitter and gain a following. Haven’t done this yet. Twitter is blocked at the office (where I’m typing this). At home on week nights I have two hours of writing time, unless I totally ignore my wife and limit myself to less than 6 hours of sleep, in which case I can squeeze in four a week night. Saturdays require lots of home maintenance stuff and leaves little quality time of brain and body function for writing. Sundays might give me six hours, again with some loss of interaction with the wife. How in the world could I find time for meaningful Twitter work?

They say start a personal e-newsletter, describing your writing work and the items you are working on or have available. Give something away to everyone who subscribes to it. You get their e-mail address, send out a newsletter with some regularity, and hope some of them buy your new works when you announce them. See the time factor in the previous paragraph.

This probably sounds like a rant, and I suppose it is. How does a working, commuting author find time to both write and market? I haven’t found the balance yet. Maybe if I dug ditches all day I might find brainpower available in the evenings, but I work with my brain, and often those two hours are difficult to make productive.

What do you think? Any suggestions for how an author with a full-time job and home and family responsibilities can be his own Chief Marketing Officer?

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, poetry, self-publishing

Stewardship of my Writing Time

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I posted recently that I was going through a dry time, not writing much. I also mentioned that the main creative things I wrote during this time was a haiku. The inspiration for this was the blizzard we had last winter. Early the morning after went out in the sub-zero temperature to shovel 16 inches of snow. I wasn’t going to work that day, and my truck was parked up the hill, not in the driveway. But I woke up that day to a glorious sun. Past observation has proved that the sun’s radiant energy will melt the residual sheen left on the driveway after shoveling, even in very cold temperatures. An amazing thing, radiant energy.

So I shoveled, taking frequent breaks due to the depth of snow. As the sun rose high enough, I noticed that ice or snow crystals were fluttering in front of it. The air was so cold (somewhere around -12F) that the little moisture in the air was condensing. Enough to have a few crystals or flakes, not enough to be called precipitation. The line “ice crystals flutter” stuck in my mind, and I realized it would make a good line in a haiku. As I shoveled I worked on it, but the full thing didn’t gel.

Over the last four months I kept coming back to it, convinced a short poem was begging to be released. Finally last weekend it gelled. The impetus for that is an anthology being put together by some Missouri writers groups to help replenish school libraries damaged in the Joplin tornado. They want short stories or poems concerning storms, any type of storms. That was a good motivator to get quiet for a while and finish my haiku.

What about my writing time in general? Yesterday evening went well. I began work on the next chapter of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I think I had less than five hundred words of text added, but at least I sent some words from brain to keyboard to hard drive. I figured out how I want to approach the chapter. I also brainstormed the next chapter, running scene and dialog through my mind.

I guess because the haiku captured my mind for a while, I went to Absolute Write and critiqued three poems. None of them took very long to do, maybe ten minutes each, a little more for the villanelle. Here are the links to those citrus (password is “citrus”):

“Uke’s Lament” (ninth post)

“Malicious Intent” (second and eight posts)

“My Fingers Softly Upon Your Cheek” (second post)

These are not earth-shattering creativity, but they keep my mind engaged.

Of course, since a writer is supposed to be their own best marketer. And a self-published writer is their own publisher. So part of my time must be dedicated to these. Today has included some marketing brainstorming. Tonight, after our BNC Writers meeting, might involve some more research for publishing with SmashWords. I’m close to completing my review of their Style Guide, after which I can begin to upload my two e-books to that sales platform.

So all in all, not bad with my stewardship of time. Still have a way to go before I can claim to have my act together, however.

Writing

A Dry Time

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That’s what it’s been in my writing life lately, a dry time. I’ve been on my own at home lately, with Lynda in Oklahoma City, helping our daughter while her husband was away. He came back late Saturday night, and Lynda will return home today or tomorrow. While she’s been gone, I’ve not done a lot of writing.

One excuse I had was the computer I normally work at was in the shop, to determine what the blue screen error followed by the black screen re-boot error was all about, and hoping it was salvageable. It has all my writing works on there. I have most of them backed up, but the latest things added to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People and my Harmony of the Gospels I had not backed up. Also, my financial spreadsheets were on that computer. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to lose those, but I’d rather not lose them.

I wanted most to work on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, as of all the things I pitched at the Write-To-Publish Conference, that seemed to me to have the most potential. I could work on a scene or two somewhere late in the book, but I mostly wanted to add one more chapter consecutive to what I’ve done so far before sending it to agents and editors. Alas, I’m missing a chapter and a half in what I have backed up. I was supposed to get the computer back last Friday, then last Saturday, now today. The delays are not making me hopeful about recovery of my files.

Meanwhile, I have Lynda’s computer available, the one she never uses (instead using the laptop upstairs and avoiding The Dungeon entirely). I’ve used that to check e-mails and Facebook and blogs. On that I sent all my thank yous to the faculty and staff of the WTP conference. On it I did a lot of fine tuning to my writer’s web site. On it I made a number of posts to my Facebook author fan page. So the lack of a computer was not a true hindrance to writing.

So what did I accomplish these last twelve days while I was alone at the house, besides the things mentioned above? Here’s a list.

  • Organized my thoughts about how to restructure the John Wesley book into a series of study guides, as suggested by the editor for Wesleyan Publishing House. This included an outline of the series, as well as some work on which of John Wesley’s writings would be in some of the small group study books.
  • Researched SmallGroups.com, and downloaded and printed a study to use as a guide for how I might organize mine. I completed review of that one study last night; time to download another one.
  • Read a fair amount in John Wesley’s Letters, volume 4. From this I identified some things that are suitable for the Wesley books.
  • Completed a private critique of a short story for someone in BNC Writers, and began a second similar critique (almost complete).
  • Read a book self-published by a member of BNC Writers.
  • Did some research for The Candy Store Generation. Not a lot of research, but I developed a system for the subject I’m researching. It should go somewhat fast from this point on. At least I hope so.
  • Did a small amount of research for a future volume of Documenting America.
  • Completed a haiku that has been on my mind since February, and submitted it for inclusion in an anthology.
  • Registered for SmashWords, which publishes e-books to just about every e-reader platform, and markets to each of them. Downloaded and printed their style guide and have reviewed a little over half of its 87 pages. That sounds like a lot, but I should have been able to finish all of it in this time.

When I list it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad. But I know what I could have accomplished in a quiet house with no one to interact with except myself. I could have completed two or three chapters of FTSP. I could have typed actual outlines of the Wesley project. I could have written a couple of chapters of the next volume of Documenting America.

Well, I have no way of reclaiming the last twelve days, and find no reason to bemoan the progress I didn’t make. Better to be thankful for the progress I did make, and do better the next twelve days. Writers group is tomorrow evening, so at least I have a focus for the next couple of days. And maybe I’ll get the computer back this evening, with its new hard drive cloned from the failing one.

miscellaneous, Writing

Conference Assimilation: The Thank Yous

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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.

Author | Engineer