Excuse #2 For Being Such a Blogging Slug

The second reason I neglected my blog for so long was because of the writers conference hosted by LDStorymakers in Salt Lake City on May 5-7 at the Sheraton Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was up to my ears in conference prep, as I not only was on the planning/production committee, but I helped with the First Chapter contest, guided a table at the 6-hour-long Boot Camp on Thursday, and was in charge of sponsors and door prizes. Oh, and I taught two workshop sessions.



Storymakers were very generous with donations of books for doorprizes. They were so generous that I had to limit them to one copy per title and three titles per author. I had a tight time budget to get the books out, but I wanted to make sure that each author received good exposure. To do that, I made a PowerPoint slide for each book so that, as the emcee read the blurb, conference attendees could see the name of the author and the cover image.

One attendee suggested that we have a list of the books in the order they'd be given out in the syllabus so people could circle ones that they would be interested in buying. If they trust me to do door prizes again next year, I'm going to do that.

I called on nine minions to help me in the presentation process. What a great bunch of ladies! They not only wore the hats that designated which presentation team they were on with good grace, but they streamlined the process and problem solved as we went along.


Above are Laurie Lewis, Joan Sowards and Ronda Hinrichsen. Other team members were JoAnn Arnold, Rebecca Talley, Tanya Mills, Wendy Swore, Janette Rallison and Debbie Davis.



Kim Grant won a copy of Janette Rallison's My Double Life. Here's a picture of Kim with Janette after the presentation.







JoAnn Arnold, author of Prince Etcheon, stands with Christine Bryant, winner of a copy of JoAnn's book.







Dennis Gaunt, winner of The Stone Traveler, is pictured here with the book's author, Kathi Oram Peterson.











Bethany Kitchen (on the right) won Tanya Mills' book The Reckoning. Here she is with the author.













My book, Counting the Cost, was won by Marta Smith.







There were about 500 people in attendance at this conference. Countless hours were volunteered as members of the writers' guild, LDStorymakers, put this conference together. There were 9 breakout sessions, each with 8 or 9 workshops covering craft basics, advanced craft, genre, and marketing/career development.

There were also national market agents and editors there, and if you want to find out about the classes or the agents and editors that were there, go to http://www.ldstorymakers.com/ , click on Conference and then click on 2011 highlights.


But this blog isn't about that. It's about the hours I--and lots of others like me--put in to make this conference a success.


I think we did all right.

But, on my to-do list next year is to have some blog posts written and ready to go before I get up to my eyeballs in conference prep.