MamaRed, most technical writers are like you. For me, once the "geek" day is done, I don't want to look at or touch my computer. Many many many tech writers I have worked with or known through the years have that capacity to go from geekdom to having the creative, free-spirited side. It's a quality that does make us successful in this career. You are able to pull yourself from the nitty gritty details to be able to make something terribly dull, boring, and detailed exciting and come to life for a non-technical person.

The truth be told, I haven't been to an STC conference in five years LOL. I'm still active in the org, but basically enough to maintain membership and contacts through SIGs and two Ohio chapters.

I work and teach. I work for pay by writing documentation for a firm that does virtual reality and animation/simulation for training, conferencing, and commercial purposes. By night I am an unpaid adult tech ed instructor for a local church/United Way organization. It's an organization that provide free or low-cost job skill training and GED education for underprivileged individuals/families.

I often find myself gravitating towards non-profit volunteerism. Before I moved to Columbus, I was a SCORE volunteer and did the PR/marketing/promo work for a chapter of SCORE in SW Ohio. I have a very "business" like management-type side to me and SCORE was just one of those very worthy organizations that appealed to me that way...they counsel, assist, help finding funding for, and promote small businesses through retired executives providing all of the free counseling and assistance. That is a great organization, but I'm also fairly schizo in some ways. My education in college was in English/comm and in marketing, so that for me was my "release" of creativity. I just never "felt" the need to do the motivational/creative/spiritual type writing. Creativity for me comes out in other ways...cooking, photography, arts/crafts. If I have to even LOOK at a computer when I'm not working or volunteering, I wanna puke