Okay, this is going to sound corny as heck. I was reading Nicholas Sparks' book "A Walk to Remember" and I finally realized what I needed to do to have my stories work better. My characters have to be better narrators. I write in first person like Sparks, and as I was reading his book I saw how his characters do a very good job of describing location and situations.

My characters don't do that. They talk about what they're thinking and feeling, but they never step back and function a true narrator of a story. I dont' know. It's such a simple thing, but I never got it until I read Sparks' book.

Not that Nicholas Sparks is the best writer out there. I like his books and all, especially "The Notebook", but let's face it, he's not the great American novelist. But I'm not either. What he is, is a good story teller. The guy must sell a lot of books because many of his books have been made into movies, and Hollywood tends to only want to make movies from very popular books.

"A Walk to Remember" is even a very good book, and I fell asleep during the movie. The book is completely maudlin and the subject has been done to death, but there was something about his style of writing which really inspired me.

So the big news we heard today at work is the director for our group is leaving to take a job at another health plan. Personally, I think she left because she knew she wasn't going to get promoted. There was a VP position in the division, but the job was up in Sacramento. Someone else was promoted to the job.

I don't think our director would have made a good VP. She's a great project manager, but I can't see her as a VP. She did get a great job starting up a division at the other health plan, so she didn't do too badly. Here's some fun gossip. She was in the same MBA program as the guy who won on the first "Apprentice".

So I booked my hotel reservations at this nice resort on Kauai that I've been to for meals, they have one of the best brunches on the island, but never to stay. Check the place out - Sheraton Kauai. I get a buffet breakfast every day, which I plan to eat late so I can combine my breakfast and lunch together, and there's a free Mai Tai Happy Hour at sunset. Too bad I don't really drink anymore, although I may have drink a few cocktails just for old time's sake. I've swum at this beach before and it's beautiful. And yeah! There's a decent fitness center so I can work out. There's also internet access, so I will be blogging from the hotel when I get there.

Something strange is happening at my job. I came into work today and there was an invite from the director for our group for a department luncheon. The rumor mill started up and people started gossiping about how some key people in our division left, and that the luncheon which has since been rescheduled till Thursday will be an announcement of these resignations.

The rumor is that the resignations will cause our group to be split up. Nobody knows what's really going on and I'm bummed that we have to wait until Thursday. I hate when your higher-ups do that. If the news is that earth shattering and important, why not just tell us? Even my immediate boss didn't know that the heck was going on. She's not even going to be there because she's going to be in an HR training that day.

One thing I didn't mention last week was that there was layoffs in my division that I found out about when I came back from vacation. There was a woman there who'd been there for years and started a Pain Management program. The program was cut so they laid her off. When I found this out, I realized how grateful I should be just to have my job. The program I was originally hired for was terminated last year, and thankfully there will another program to replace it. Plus I decided my job needed to evolve so I could work on my presentation skills and my bosses agreed and now I'm probably going to have give perhaps 8 presentations this year.

I'm excited about this new development. I gave my first presentation last year and despite my nervousness, it went really well and the group I presented to was very appreciative. With practice, I think I could become very comfortable giving presentations and not have it be the nerve-wracking experience it usually is for me.

I worked on a project last year where I had to facilitate conference call meetings with hospital folks from UCSF Hospital, Cedars-Sinai Hospital in LA, and Childrens Hospital in San Diego. I arranged conference calls with the hospitals folks and the CEO of this quality measurement vendor we were working with from Massachusetts. Those meetings went very well and really gave me a confidence boost. The medical director of quality from Childrens Hospital in San Diego was such a nice guy, and an expert in the field of quality measurement for childrens hospitals. I called him after the meeting and thanked him for his participation, and he was very appreciative.

I am thankful that I was able to evolve my job in a way that I liked and that my bosses liked. I'm also writing a weekly newsletter, which is more of a weekly news briefing. It's my job to see what news stories are relevant to the field of qualtiy measurement and then do a write up with the appropriate weblinks. I like how I get to decide what I think people should read. My boss was excited by my first newsletter and now wants to send it out to the regional medical directors in the company as well as the senior medical quality director and other people she thinks might be interested.

I'm also writing up a ton of research white papers, which I actually like doing. Besides the weekly newsletter, we're also thinking of expanding the quarterly news briefing I was doing into a monthly one because there is just so much news.

I did a ton of writing last week already. I wrote up two one-page briefs for a couple of programs that were needed for meetings one of which was for an external client. Then I wrote and developed a powerpoint presentation for an executive briefing, and also started work on the presentation for our external advisory board meeting in February.