My trip to NYC October 13th to 16th was personal business with serious effort to get a book deal on my research that I completed for my PhD (I graduated August 31st, btw). It's called, The Love Survey, and is a quantitative study of couple's experiences in their romantic relationship that measured intimacy, passion, commitment and relationship satisfaction. It was a national study and I received over 1,000 surveys from all 50 states, from ages 18 - 70. Anyway... don't get me started or I'll talk too long about it. I do truly love the work I do. I really hoped that an agent or publisher would view my book idea as the next Hite Report (groundbreaking work in the late 70s). Alas, I didn't set NYC on fire and although I got good feedback from really VIP folks in the industry, I am like one of the American Idol contestents sent back to their farm in some small town. Sigh.

And so being away those days put be me wayyyy back on work and laundry and crap... so I've been trying to catch up, which is why I've not blogged... although I think about blogging everyday, wanting to do it.

New York was great. I met BLU (from the old AOL The Book Shelf chat room of a dozen years ago). My God... she is an icon and poster child for the all-together strong woman in corporate who has a suburbs gentle side to her, too. She's a great new friend. She is coming to visit and stay with me in January!

I also made a couple of dear friends who are now also trusted professional colleagues - a prosecuting attorney with a great book idea, and a comedian/filmmaker/writer talent who just sent me these photos of me she enhanced in Photoshop. I'll be pumping up their PR stuff here at my blog as their projects get rolling.

I will post some pics of the cool things I observed in NY in my next post.

For now... the dreams of writing a non-fiction as a PhD psychologist are just that... just dreams. I do have a manuscript under peer review with the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships and the publication also asked me to peer review an article by another scholar... so I know I'll be doing some academic work that I love.

Meanwhile, there is a ton of work to do in the day to day living... started a new semester teaching and working on two large marketing projects at the other job. So, in a sense, the trip to NY was kinda like a vacation... I had good food, great conversations with strangers who became friends... visited Central Park, Time Square, the Fashion District, and walked until my feet felt like they would fall off. Traveling alone wasn't so bad, either. I think I could do the city-girl thing!