Category: events

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a festival of books

I have a confession to make.  I have never been to a book festival or convention or other celebration of books.  Not as a reader, certainly not as a writer.  Some of the reasons for this are fundamental issues of who I am, namely the agoraphobic part of who I am.  Large crowds, even mediocre crowds in small spaces make me sweat, palpitate, hyperventilate and ultimately need to leave quickly unless I do an awful lot of prep work first.

So, when I show up on Sunday, June 4th at Civic Center Park in Berkeley, California, I will be attending my first event.

babf_logo The Bay Area Book Festival is in it’s third year, and while I’d love to be able to attend some of the talks and such on Saturday, I have other obligations.  But come Sunday morning, I will load up my cart with books and a table cloth (reminder to self, get a tablecloth), my tablet and credit cart doohicky plus a bunch of water and snacks for the day, and I will BART myself into Berkeley and find my assigned place in the park for the day.

Of course, I hope to sell enough books to break even on the day, but beyond that, my hope is that I can keep my agoraphobic anxiety down and that I get to meet new folks, talk about my books and other books.  I’d love to meet readers who are passionate about what they read and love.  I’d also love to meet fellow authors who are passionate about what they write and love.

If it isn’t too much to hope for, I’m going to hope that some of my friends and family come out to see me too.  It isn’t every day an author gets to do their first event like this…and if I’m being truthful, maybe having someone watch my table for a bit while I look around would be awesome too.

So, if you’re somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area and fancy some book loving come Sunday, June 4th, you should hope on BART and take yourself to the Berkeley Civic Center station.  The park is just a short walk away.

I won’t be too hard to find.  I’ll be the author with green hair, probably wearing a fedora or other hat, and possibly a Star Wars shirt, depending on my mood.  Come Say HI!

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the choices we make

I am childless by choice.  When I was younger I thought I wanted a big family, with lots of kids.  Then I thought I only wanted one.  I even took a few steps toward making it happen.  But in the end, I eventually realized that I did not need a child born from my body to fulfill some societal construction of being a woman.

Which isn’t to say that I haven’t been a mother.  In the years when my two nieces were young, I lived with my brother and his wife and I helped parent two amazing people.  I showered all of my mothering on them, and they turned out to be beautiful young adults.

I’m not knocking those who chose to give birth.  I think it’s a beautiful thing.  I stand in awe of mothers everyday.  I know my own mother is a super-hero in my eyes.  Always has been. My parents split when I was 11, and my mother had primary custody.

Divorce is always ugly for the kids, even when the parents do their best to shield them from the acrimony.  I was old enough to see it all, and while I thought I knew what was going on, I can see looking back that I didn’t understand it all.

But, life after the break up was tough.  My mother did her best though, and she loved us fiercely.  I learned a lot of life skills from her.  I learned compassion and sacrifice from her.

I didn’t need to give birth to understand motherhood.  I didn’t need an infant in my arms to know unconditional love.  I chose to give my mothering to those in need, from my nieces, to the homeless, from pets to families struggling with poverty around the globe.  These are my children, and I could never love them as I do without learning that love from my own mother.

So, happy Mother’s Day, to my mother, my sister-in-law, all of you who mother, whether your own child or others who need you.  The choices we make define us.  Choose love first.

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out from under

This has not been a good week.  I get migraines, and this week I had one doozy of a migraine. It came on during the day at work Tuesday, and I left work early.  Stayed home on Wednesday, tried to work on Thursday, but only got to about 1pm before I called it quits and came home.

Yesterday was the first day I had some relief.  I worked from home because I was afraid the sunlight would set it off again.  Today I am finally out from under it.

That means that all my grand plans for getting stuff done during the week didn’t happen and that leaves me with a fair amount of things to do this weekend, from Pride prep to writing and housework.

I suppose I should get busy doing some of that.  But before I go, let me remind you that I will be holding down a table at the Bay Area Book Festival on Sunday, June 4!  If you’re in the SF Bay area, you should come down and say hello!

Hope all of you have a fantastic weekend.  I’ll pop in with something for Mother’s day tomorrow.

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donations, community, partners

Sometimes I think that the Mondays that follow productive weekends are harder than the ones that follow lazy weekends. We’re heading into the time of year when I have little time for lazy.  There are obligations and volunteer duties, family time and other crazy stuff.

I have volunteered with San Francisco Pride for better than ten years, working in the Donations Partners department.  Essentially, we are the people who greet festival goers with big pink pickle buckets asking for donations to help support the parade and festival. This year I have stepped up to manage the Donations Partners.  It’s a huge task, and a lot of responsibility, but I confess that I love the challenge.

You may wonder where that donation money goes.  And who are all of those people with the buckets anyway?

We partner with community organizations, non-profit groups that work with the LGBT community in some way.  They come from all sections of the spectrum, from groups that work with the homeless, to social organizations, from youth groups to cheerleaders, from churches to other religious groups, from local community centers to drag queens and their courts. Each of these organizations provides volunteers to do the bucket thing.

It’s a long day of work, but each hour that a volunteer works earns money for their organization.  At the end of the festival, the donations money is tallied up, and some of it goes back to the Pride organization to help pay the bills.  The rest is divided up into an hourly rate, and each of the partner organizations gets a grant based on the number of hours their volunteers put in.

Unfortunately, the work puts a bit of a quash on my writing.  Which was my long winded way of saying that I didn’t get much writing done this weekend.  But I did get to take my 68 year old mother to a tattoo shop for the first time in her life.  We took my niece to get her ears pierced.  It was an experience, I’ll say.

But no writing.  I guess I’ll have to try harder through the week.  I need to finish my short story so I can start editing for the anthology, and then I can get back to the world of Shades and Shadows.

 

 

 

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and that, as they say, is that…

My Goodreads giveaways ended last night.  A total of 2512 people joined in the fun, and 4 of those lucky people won a copy of my books!  Congratulations to them!  I will get those in the mail over the weekend.  I will probably do more giveaways in the future, but if you wish to purchase signed copies of either book, head over to my shop on Facebook where you can do that.

I really do love giving books away.  And I love connecting with people who have read my books and talking about the stories and how they came to be, whisper hints about what is to come.

I’m really glad I will have a few opportunities to do that this year, live and in person.  The next such event is at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, California on the weekend of June 3 & 4.  I will have an author table on the Sunday of the event where I will have books for sale and signing.  I hope that readers in the area might make it out to say hello.  I will be able to take cash and credit cards at the table.

Now, with the sun finally out of my eyes, after nearly blinding me as it rose from behind the exit ramp of the Bay Bridge, I will wish you all a pleasant Thursday, exhort you to acts of kindness toward others and yourself, and turn my eyes, and fingers, to words of a more technical nature.

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start your engines

We’re getting closer to the release date of February 1st, and you can pre-order your Kindle version of Through Shade and Shadow right now.  You can also get a paperback from Amazon right now. If you have Amazon Prime, you could be reading it this weekend!

I find it a little amusing that I don’t even have my first copy of it (I should have it soon) and there are people who have purchased it and are reading it.

I wanted to do a local book launch party in February, but haven’t been able to secure a location yet.  I will, however, have a table at the Bay Area Book Fair in June in Berkeley.  For my Pagan fans, I will be at Pantheacon in San Jose February 17-20 and I’ll likely have copies on me, so if you see me and want one, please ask.

If you want a signed copy and aren’t local, I am working on getting a system set up to order directly from this site.  I hope to have it up and functional by the time I get my box of books.

I also have a giveaway set up on Goodreads.  It will open on the first of February.

And if you want to chat, come by my facebook page or hit up my Goodreads inbox.