It’s only been since Wednesday that I last blogged, but it feels like it’s been weeks! Since Wednesday, I’ve made a Rain Boots Required stop at West Linn Public library and spent two long days at the Wordstock festival in Portland.
Dudes and dudettes, so much has happened!
The tour stop in West Linn was fabulous. We had another great turn out and this time our audience was filled with actual young adults. They asked great questions – about writing and publishing and technique. Watch out, y’all, the next crop of writers are gonna be some savvy upstarts!!
Thanks so much to Elaine, the Teen librarian at WLPL. She made us feel so welcome and she is such a dedicated and awesome librarian. The kids of West Linn are lucky to have her and her bosses on their side. The teen section of their library is a place that I know I would’ve loved to spend time in as a YA because I’m now having fantasies about escaping to there as an adult.
My apologies to Lisa Nowak and Laura Elliott for my less than stellar AV skillz. I think we can all agree I shouldn’t be in charge of taping the talks anymore!! 
Saturday and Sunday were spent at Wordstock from 10-6. We had VooDoo Doughnuts at our table and let me tell y’all, doughnuts are the great equalizer. We talked (and talked and talked and talked) to so many people who might not have stopped by our booth if it wasn’t for those crazy doughnuts.
I shared a booth with authors Angela Carlie and Laura Elliott. Lisa Nowak was at another booth, but she popped over frequently to hang out. We had such a blast!
Since I had to register the booth name before we had even named our author tour and I wasn’t sure who exactly was going to share it with me, I named it Pacific Northwest YA Authors. Good name, right?
Plenty of folks thought so. In fact, a lot of people thought we were an organization and wanted to join. At first, we laughed about it and told them we just needed a name for our booth, then, well it occurred to us that maybe we were an organization of sorts. More of a group, but we had authors wanting to join and librarians and teachers wanting us to come give talks at their schools.
Never one to turn down an opportunity…
I give you Pacific Northwest YA Authors.
The website and e-mail address were created on Saturday night when I couldn’t sleep but for thinkin’. Today, we signed up four schools/libraries to give talks at and collected over 20 e-mail addresses from people who want to receive our newsletter.
There’s just a welcome post up there right now, but by the end of this week I should have all of our Abouts, videos, reference links, contact info., guidelines for joining, etc. up.
Another awesome thing that happened at Wordstock besides networking our asses off, was that Lisa Nowak noticed the Trends in Publishing panel was the most well attended one of the whole event. And you know what? The panelists talked about self-publishing, but didn’t have a ton of experience with it. So, Lisa and I tracked down the incoming director of Wordstock and pitched her a self-publishing panel for next year. She seemed into it and said we were the first people to pitch her a panel for the following year. Who knows what will come of it, but I can’t stress enough that it never hurts to ask for what you want!
ROW80 update: If you’ve stuck around, I have good thangs to share about this too! (Seriously, I had three doughnuts today and am soooo high on the sugar!!) I talked about my decent word count for Tuesday on Wednesday. Yay! On Thursday, I fired up my new Final Draft software.
Guys, I’m in love. Yes, I actually heart software.
Although my ultimate dream would’ve been to pick a TV format and then copy and paste what I’d already written directly into it, what I got was pretty close. I selected the script format that they use on Grey’s Anatomy and copy and pasted line by line what I’d written so far. Voila! Formatted script. So easy to use. I spent the last hour of my writing time creating new stuff for the script. It’s such a fun project because I get to rewrite my book without having to actually rewrite my book. Writing new dialogue for the Rosedell gang made me absolutely ecstatic. There’s a new conversation between Avery and his best friend Jason that had me laughing my butt off. It’s fun to be back in Zellie’s world in a new way.
Okay, I’m off to work on the PacNWYA website before my sugar crash commences. Peace out.
