Author Archives: Jeannie Lin

What’s your Time Machine Moment?

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Hubby and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary this week (yeah, I know…just a couple of kids in love, right?). I recounted something really sweet he said to me and it sparked a delightful conversation at Romance Divas. It made me want to open the thread up a bit, so I thought I’d ask the same question here:

What’s Your Time Machine Moment?

Hubby and I were reminiscing a bit about how we met. A funny second meeting was when he was a hired gun for my company. He was in over his head and didn’t know how to program at all. I was heading out to lunch and he happened to run into me. He remembered me being in the training class so he managed to drag me over to help him with an IF statement. I stared at the screen and asked him if he’d ever run that code, because he had bigger problems than the IF statement. Over the next several years, he and I worked a couple times together, he became a pretty decent coder and earns a decent living from it, and of course we eventually got married a decade later. *vbg*

Hubby made a very sweet remark that if anyone wanted to get in a time machine and mess up his life, that would be the moment to do it. All they had to do was delay him by one minute so I had already walked out the door to lunch.

I don’t know when my time machine moment would be. Maybe it’d be back with my Mum being pregnant and making the decision to get on the boat to leave Vietnam right before the war ended. She did this despite a deathly fear of water — a fortune teller had told her that water was dangerous for her and she always had an irrational fear of drowning because of it. She never learned how to swim and ironically her name means “Ocean” in Vietnamese. Maybe that fortune teller was a minion of Dr. Evil!

So what’s your time machine moment?

Confession: Why I don’t hate promotion

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I was attending a Warrior Writer workshop presented by Bob Mayer last weekend and at one point he asked, “Who here actually likes to promote?” I raised my hand and since I was sitting near the front, I didn’t realize that all the chuckling was aimed at me. The odd ball.

I don’t hate promoting. I actually kind of like it. I like this whole author thing, really. (Stopping myself before I start sounding too Pollyanna.)

I know I’m supposed to hate promoting and networking and love the introverted writing part. Well, I do love the introverted writing part. I’m sometimes afraid that since I don’t babble enough about the angst of writing that people might think I don’t write, but who wants to hear about my day at the office? Well, maybe other writerly types might find it interesting, just like me and the techies like to go on sometimes about integration issues and data elements and message formats that only we understand–a day job aside there. Were you bored? I thought so.  And writing about the introverted writing part makes me more angsty and introverted, and I can only take so much of that even from myself.

Maybe I like promoting because I’m too clueless to realize I’m supposed to hate it? Or too self-absorbed to really realize that it’s a scary and confusing thing?

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