It was a dark and stormy night and still half of the dozen people who had signed up for the Baltimore regional AMWA-MAC event managed to make the meeting at Elaine Richman's home in the Mt. Washington section of Baltimore. The October 17 event was booked as dinner and a “show-and-tell” evening, and was true to its word. We broke bread together and then each described our individual niche as medical writers.

Medical book indexer Debra Patton demystified indexing by describing the degree of concentration that goes into the work and the software that makes the job manageable. The community of indexers is small, she reported, and the demand is high. Newcomers to medical writing might want to consider indexing as a career. Amy Hodson Thompson described her work as a writer for the web, including the Johns Hopkins University site called cognito.org. Amy is in the process of writing a book and building a career in medical and scientific writing.

Next was Michael Altus, longtime AMWA member and former AMWA-MAC president. Michael told the story of his life as a scientist and medical writer and shared details of his recently acquired skills in business marketing. Michael's company is called Intensive Care Communications, Inc. We all agreed about the importance of aggressive and steady marketing for building and maintaining a medical writing business.

Neysa Narena, who travels with a beautiful kayak on top of her car, came from Annapolis for the meeting. Neysa provides her clients with a variety of technical writing and desktop publishing services. She showed an impressive array of technical guides published by her company Narena Associates LLC. Also at the meeting was pharmacologist Rachel Bongiorno, who is new to our field. We all know how valuable her knowledge base is and are happy to help her make progress as a medical writer. Finally, Elaine Richman talked about her career as a medical writer and business owner. Elaine is president of Richman Associates, LLC, a bioscience communications company. She showed a book they'd done on Parkinson's disease for Harvard University Press and a variety of projects for clients in eye and vision.

The Baltimore regional group of AMWA-MAC plans to hold quarterly meetings. Please check the AMWA-MAC website for announcements of upcoming events. If you have questions or ideas for future regional events, contact Elaine Richman, Ph.D., Baltimore regional coordinator.