Labor Day always reminds me of a time nearly two decades ago when I worked for a small company that manufactured ferrites–think the shield beads on your laptop’s power cord. It was a privately-owned company and I worked there for about 9 months.
On the Tuesday after Labor Day, I went in to the office and the owner/boss asked me “where was everybody yesterday?” I told him yesterday was Labor Day. He replied, “I don’t remember giving everyone Labor Day off.”
What a slap in the face. but then, this was a guy who, while sitting in a potential customer’s office in Tokyo misplaced his glasses. “Goddam Nips stole my glasses.” Really? Harvard Business School must teach that in the customer relations class.
Yeah. I couldn’t get out of that place fast enough.
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Coppercon yesterday was fun. I had a reading at 5:00 and read an unpublished story called Radio Waves. Attending the reading were Dani Kollin, Eytan Kollin, and Rachel Ann Dryden.  It was pretty well received.
Following the reading, I sat on a panel with Guest of Honor Stephen R Donaldson with the topic of multi-cultural writing. The topic strayed, driven by questions from the audience, but we did cover the topic for maybe half the hour.
It was fun because Steve and I were the only two on the panel. He writes mostly fantasy, and I write mostly SF. He grew up in India, and through marriage, I live in two cultures all the time. We both had some interesting things to say about the subject, and we use other cultures in different ways when we write.
One thing that surprised me–during my introduction, I said that I had around 40 published short stories. Donaldson said that he was in awe of anyone with that many short stories because he has written maybe fifteen of them in his life. Of course, I responded that his total word count dwarfs mine by a couple orders of magnitude.
