A festival to celebrate

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="142" caption="Donna Galanti"][/caption]

Me, acting like an author

I haven't acted much like a writer lately. I mean, I've been doing the writing part, but not the communicating part. I think last year when I was preparing for my first book to come out, I was so overwhelmed with everything there was to I finally just gave up on getting it all done. Then a couple of weeks ago Donna Galanti,  another writer with Echelon, contacted me about doing a guest post for her blog, and I realized how much I'd been neglecting. My thanks to Donna for giving me a nudge. You can read my post and Donna's dynamic blog at http://blog.donnagalanti.com/wp/.

This past weekend I attended the South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia as an exhibitor at the Echelon Press booth, and voila, I felt like a writer again. It was kind of hard not to. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of folks there, all of them attending because they love to read or to write or to learn about it. So I talked about Snowstorm and why I wrote it. I told each person who stopped why they would like reading it. Lots of aspiring writers stopped in asking for advice or talking about their own love for words and books. The other authors in our booth were all passionate about their own work. So for two days I talked writing and writers and Echelon and reading and... How could I not get that renewed enthusiasm? For the past few weeks - since the end of the school year - I've been running from one state to another, visiting family and making other necessary trips, but today I find myself home alone in front of the computer. I'm blogging (as you can see), tweeting, facebooking, and in a little while, I will ignore the laundry and the vacuuming and I will write.

If you're a writer, try the SC Book Festival (http://www.scbookfestival.org/index.php?c=home) for a bit of inspiration. And if you're a reader, it's got everything. Next time I must go and hear the speakers like Mary Alice Wilson, Ron Rash,Richard Paul Evans, Pat Conroy, Therese Fowler and several others. There are writing classes, etc., etc. I gotta remember I can't just write, I have to get out there and have a little festival time! I hope you find some festival to celebrate too.