Awesome Writing Nerd Weekend

I cannot believe this weekend, the awesomeness of which has seeped into my Monday (and who doesn't want a better Monday?).

Here's what happened, and I'm so excited about it, I'm going to present it in a list (you know I love lists...):

1.  On Saturday I attended Oregon Christian Writers' One-Day Winter Conference.*  I will write more details about this on my other blog; suffice it to say, it was a fantastic day.  It looked for a moment like it might not be so great: I made it to campus early** and got lost, found the building and had to park kind of far away, walked in and discovered I had the wrong building, patiently waited for my phone to load my email so I could get the correct building information, kept missing my turns to that building (that campus is smaller than it looks on the map), and had to park far away when I finally found it.  So I ended up being late.  Which I hate.

I was even later taking my seat, due to getting my books into the conference bookstore - I missed all the opening stuff and got to a seat in the auditorium just after the keynote speaker, Dr. Bill Giovannetti, started speaking.  But his two presentations/speeches/keynote addresses were wonderful.  They were fun, encouraging, inspiring, and focused on God.  Perfect.

The workshops after lunch were really good (especially the poetry as prayer workshop by Colette Tennant), and I got to hang out with a woman I met at the fall one-day conference, the publishers I edit for, and one of the authors (Susan Maas), whose book^ I edited and loved.  And purchased at the conference bookstore.  And told at least ten other people that they should buy it, as well, which was the truth.

I myself sold three copies of my book, which I think is pretty phenomenal.

Click to order!

2.  I had a great day at church yesterday.  The sermon was very interesting, I finally got a copy of my book into the hands of the lady who runs the church library/bookstore (trying to see if I could donate a copy to the library), and spent almost three hours with the young adult group.  The only downside to Sunday was that my hands were still bothering me from all the note-taking and book-carrying I did on Saturday, so about ten minutes into practicing guitar I had to call it quits.  But the weather was beautiful and I went for a nice walk.

3.  Today my mock publishing company (for a class) met up to go over a few things before turning in our draft marketing plans, profit and loss worksheets, and cover designs for our two mock books.  I feel like we got some good work done.  We figured out things we need to ask the professor about, broke down what needs to be done between now and finals week, and so forth.  Feeling cautiously optimistic about our mock company.

To top it all off, I got home to an email from Lori, the library/bookstore manager at church.  They want to sell my book!  I cannot tell you how extremely happy that makes me.  Even if it only sells a few copies, and I'm hopeful it will sell several, it has the church's stamp of approval, which is really lovely.


So, yeah.  I'm feeling pretty good right about now.  And I made a taco for lunch, and who doesn't like that?



*The next one will be in the Spring.

**The conference was held at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, OR.

^Picture Imperfect, a fantastic middle grade book.