Thankfulness #21: Entries!

Yesterday I was grateful for contest entries. After the expo in Des Moines, I had left over stuff; a poster that I won’t be able to reuse (by the Book Born Expo I’ll have book 9 out), some leftover books no one bought, and like 50 bags of swag. I sent some of the swag off to I SMell Sheep review blog and the Book Born group, but what to do with the rest of it?

Initially I had planned to do a raffle and try to recoup some of my expo losses, but a quick google search of “Raffle Legal” proved that impossible. (Hint: Raffles are gambling, and gambling is not legal. Non Profits can get away with it in some states, but since I’m hardly a non-profit…*sigh*) Yes, I’ve seen other authors do it, but my luck would be I’d be the one who got smacked for it, so instead I just have to do a giveaway. I’ve tried to offset this by giving people six entries for proving they purchased Brothers of Darkness, but so far no one has done that. I have gotten 15 “freebie” entries, and 4 “website celebration” entries, and that’s waaaaay more than I figured I’d have on day 2. Usually I do things like this and get maybe 10 by the end of the week.

Want to enter? You can check out the giveaway and find links to enter on my author blog.

Aside from that, we went pokemoning in Red Oak for a couple of hours and, despite the cold, I did walk enough to get the final candy I needed to complete the 400 Magicarp candies and create:

TA DA!! It’s taken me months to get this thing! I finally had to put magicarp as my buddy and walk with him to get the last candies. Now I need to work on evolving a Pikachu.

We also watched WWE Survivor Series. Some of the outcomes were quite surprising, and some weren’t. I knew poor Kalisto wouldn’t get the win, though I was rooting for him, and I thought if they were doing it the smart way they’d let Goldberg have it, though everyone else in the house thought it would be Lesner, so I got to bask in my rightness and a lot of “Pfffft. Told you so!” I was surprised about Cesaro and Sheamus being the final winners in the Tag Team match, though that meant with the wins/loses so far that I knew which team would win the the big match, but that was okay. Ellsworth taking Stroman out was a lot of fun, and Jericho is always good and… well, I was surprised that they let Bray make the final pin. They’ve kind of under utilized him for a long time. They build him up in promos as the eater of worlds and such, and then he always loses. So while I love Roman, I did enjoy seeing him victorious. Truth be told, I had a hard time picking who I wanted to win, so as long as it was either Bray or Roman that made the final pin, I would have been happy.

And that was my exciting day. i need to get some writing done today if I can figure out how to get some quiet.

Have a 400 magicarp candy kind of day!

Jo 🙂