9 Months Later

I realize there's been a silence, a lengthy one.  I feel it in my bones - not just on the page.  I'm stuck and busy and don't know when I'll kick-start myself into serious writing again.  Clearly my brother's death has affected me profoundly.

I have completed the book of poetry to accompany Scott's photographs and got the "blessing" from his children and widow to pursue a publishing deal of the compilation, so I've sent 3 queries out to small publishing companies and another 2 inquiries out to literary agents who represent poets.  No responses so far, but it's early days.  If I wind up going the self-publishing route on this venture, it will be a printed, bound book since an e-reader / Smashwords won't be able to do his photographs justice.

Paid work has been consuming me.  There have been a lot of challenging, time-consuming employee relations to handle - along with the intensity of going for accreditation in two major fields (youth and adult mental health).  There were over 500 standards that had to be met and aside from some quick-fixing on one standard, we passed with flying colours.  We are now the first community services / non-profit in Canada to attain accreditation in both.  It's quite the accomplishment, but it took a tremendous amount of energy.  Essentially from January-July, 2014 I rewrote close to 100 HR policies and then from July to September (the date of our onsite review), I worked on cleaning up employee files and catching up with other jobs.

Then in September, the Agency's Executive Director (who has been with the organization for 40 years) announced his retirement.  An intense recruitment process was initiated by the Board of Directors (but conducted primarily by me), where I held 14 phone interviews, prepared 2 sets of interview questions for the Board to ask and carried out reference checks on 3 candidates.  I'm pleased and relieved to say that our new E.D. starts on Monday.  I think he will bring an exciting new vision and direction to the Agency, but as one of his references said, "when you get on his train, you'd better be ready to leave the station."  I only hope we can keep up with his energy level!

So that's where things stand now.  The new E.D. acknowledged within 30 minutes of our first pre-planning meeting that my workload is far too heavy for one person to carry effectively and has said he's going to change that.  Hopefully that means by April 2015 (our new fiscal year) I have some type of assistance in doing the administrative tasks of my position and can actually go back to a normal work week (instead of staying for a couple of extra hours each night).  Now that the winter is settling in and I won't be able to do much with the horses, I'm hoping it will give me time to write in the evenings again.

Noel (one of my main characters from the Aquarian Era Tales) has been visiting me again.  In the early hours of the morning when I'm emerging from sleep, he's there, always whispering, "don't forget about me...get the rest of my story down."  I have to honour that request.  He's been very good to me so far.  <g>