What a trip! And I’m STILL not home!
Last Thursday, I embarked on an adventure.
First stop, the homeschool convention in Nampa, Idaho. I sat at a booth for Marcher Lord Press (my publisher) and told people all about the cool new homeschool workbook my editor, Jeff Gerke, and his friend, Mary Agius, have written. It’s a one-semester creative writing course for a high school homeschool student. And it goes right along with Jeff’s Art & Craft of Writing Christian Fiction book. So if you are interested, check it out on the Marcher Lord Press website.
I also had my books at the homeschool convention. And I met a fan! Sweet. Here’s what happened. These two girls walked by my booth and gasped. They said, “Our friend LOVES this book! She keeps trying to get us to read it. She found it at the library.” I found out that her name is Christiana. She’s been telling her friends about my books, which is totally awesome. Her friends brought her to my booth on Friday and we got to meet. Good times.
After the homeschool convention, I got on a plane to Wyoming! Marcher Lord Press author, Steve Rzasa, invited me to the Johnson County Library to speak at their first teen summer reading program event. Turns out I am the first author the Johnson County Library has ever had come speak. I felt quite tall about that. 🙂
(FYI- Steve Rzasa wrote an awesome science fiction story about a guy who finds a Bible in a future where Bibles are against the law. It’s an awesome book. See the Novel Teen review here to learn more.)
I had a lot of fun at the library. I talked about how I became a writer and how I came up with my story. I met a couple girls who’d already read By Darkness Hid and liked it. So I had to get a picture with them. Then we all got to have root beer floats and cookies. Yum!
Afterwards I went to dinner at Steve Rzasa’s house and met his wife and kids, which was a lot of fun. They were very hospitable and the food was delicious.
Whenever I was in my hotel room these past few days, I’ve been typing, typing, typing on book three of my Blood of Kings trilogy. On the way home, one of my flights got delayed, which caused me to miss my connecting flight, leaving me stuck in the Denver airport for eleven hours! Ack! At first this was quite depressing. I’ve been gone from home almost a week now. But—praise the Lord!—the Denver airport has free wireless internet. So, I’ve been online and I’ve been writing! I wrote an extra 8000 words on From Darkness Won today. That’s about 30 double-spaced pages in Microsoft Word!
So, I’ll be driving home to John Day tomorrow. Just another day in the life of a writer. This job is always an adventure.
Later!
Jill
Now how cool is that, Jill! I didn’t know MLP had a homeschool curriculum on Creative Writing! How ticked my oldest will be when she finds out about it. She has written about 20k words in an interesting novel and I’ve tried to impart some of what I’ve learned, but she’s had it put aside for over a year now… We’ve been homeschooling for 14 years now. It’s been an interesting ride.
My youngest daughter will want that curriculum for homeschool I am sure. I’ll have to run it by the teacher of course. 😉 But I’ll bet it will help her flesh out the novella she’s already written, and perhaps spur her on to another story…
Sounds exhausting but awesome! How fun to get to chat with fans and drink rootbeer floats. What could be better?