Archive | November 4, 2016

Thankfulness #5: Made it to Des Moines

Today I’m thankful for arriving safely in Des Moines. On our way we passed a wreck involving two trucks, kind of a reminder that traveling isn’t always guaranteed.

Anoway, we got here, got a room at Motel 6:

Met Maegan Provan for dinner at Perkins:

Pie!

and now we’re heading to bed so we can be up at 7: 30 for the expo. I did some live FB on my author page – https://facebook.com/joleenenaylorbooks – and we’ll be doing some tomorrow too.

Anyway, enjoy a couple random photos and have a Perkins Pie kinda day !

Jo 🙂

November 4, 2016

Thankfulness #4: Nominations

So I’m on day four of NaBloPoMo. Go me. And today I am grateful for the awesome Teresa nominating me for book awards!

tada! How cool is that , huh? Not only am I grateful for the usual reasons (you know, it’s always amazing to be nominated ) but I am super blown away because, in seven years of publishing NO ONE has EVER surprise nominated me. I did get nominated for the Reality Bites (which I’m fairly sure I lost, but that’s ok), but to be fair I posted the link and kind of said “hint, hint.” I’m not saying I didn’t appreciate it, or it didn’t mean anything but… anyway, I think you get what I’m saying. I’m not proud to admit that for the last seven years I’ve been a bit jealous of all the authors getting nominated all over the place, while I’ve been kind of hanging back against the wall saying, “pfffft. I didn’t want to dance anyway.” even while I really did. But now, finally, like my senior year when I lost a bunch of weight and moved to a new school, now I finally get to dance, too. Does that make sense?

In other news, we’re heading to Des Moines tomorrow, which means today was panic mode to get stuff ready. The antique store in town was open, and as a surprise he got me two picnic baskets to take my expo stuff in:

Aren’t those awesome ?? I’ve been wanting one for picnics for some time now, so it was so cool.

While I’m on the expo topic, I did a dry run on my table arrangements .

Tada! Pretty frigging boring, huh? I did have the paperbacks laying flat , but it looked even worse, so we made an emergency run to hobby lobby for book easels (Google informed me they were the only place within a five hour drive , still open at 7pm) so while we were there, we hit dollar tree where I found the most awesome “cut glass” dishes, then on to Hobby Lobby for the easels and some tiny picture frames, and hubby found the perfect masquerade masks, and now…

Chaching! There are now papers in the frames that say “I Smell Sheep”, “please take one”, and “Book Born” in that order. I also printed up some tiny cards with the links to get book one free aaaand now I am as ready as I can be.