At the opening of the International Food Blogger Conference, Dorie Greenspan said something in her keynote address that surprised me, considering her name is an empire.

“Everything I do is slow.”

Greenspan has published ten cookbooks. She is a James Beard Foundation book award winner twice over. Her name is renowned in the culinary world. And yet, she told this room of 300 people, writing and recipe development are time-consuming for her. She also said, without a shred of shame, that she never had training in food or journalism. When she started out she had no writing experience.

When a friend of mine, who edits a local food-related newsletter, said I should keep track of my hours when I wrote my first article for her in 2008, I cringed. Should it have taken me upwards of 30 hours to write a 900-word story on the history of onions?

I suppose it should have, given that I was just starting out, considering that after every couple of phrases I cursored back to the top of the page and tried again, not having the heart to use the delete button. I worked and re-worked phrases and, after too much thought, defaulted to nonspecific descriptors such as “beautiful,” “fresh,” and “delicious.”

I’m a little riskier now and faster at organizing my thoughts. I also know that I don’t need to check out a shelf-full of books to write one article. But the fact remains: I’m a slow writer.

That identity has been a set of shackles, one that’s required me to rally my conscious thoughts and make myself repeat: but it doesn’t matter; slow doesn’t equal inferior.

And here was proof.

If Dorie Greenspan is slow then my work pace must be just fine.

Thank you, Dorie.

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I didn’t have a tripod at the conference and even if I had, it would have been a pain to set one up. The photos I took in the conference rooms were less than, if you know what I mean, and anyway, I took more notes than photos. So here are a few I took on Sunday morning when my roommate and I got up at the crack of dawn to walk to Pike Place Market. The idea was to get some shots of people setting up their stalls. Turns out 4:30 a.m. on Sunday is way too early for that. We met a few people anyway, got the inside story on the market’s resident ghosts, and saw the market as it usually isn’t: empty.

This post is the third and final in a series, an agreement between bloggers attending the International Food Blogger Conference and the sponsors of the event, Foodista and Zephyr Adventures. In exchange for a reduced conference fee, each participant agrees to write three posts about the conference. I’ve determined the content of these posts and have received no compensation for product mentions or links.