Some Changes in Store!

I've done some shuffling of domain names and websites, so here's the lowdown:

My domain name www.AngelicaRJackson.com now points to a shiny new author website! It has a place for news and events, links to my social contacts, and links to my books (once I have something available to pre-order or order, that is).

My photography galleries that formerly lived at the above domain are now at www.AngelicaRJackson.photography, oddly enough. They will still serve as a place to buy prints, digital downloads, and gift items featuring my photographs.

This blog will remain at this address, and will also feed into my website and Goodreads Author Page. I will still be blogging at Operation Awesome every other Monday, and starting August 15 my OA posts will show up on Angelic Muse a few days later. Original content on here will be sharing whatever strikes my fancy: photos from trips, interesting tidbits I've unearthed in research, and the like.

More of the day-to-day stuff shows up on my Facebook profile if that sort of thing interests you, and so do the links to conferences, grant opportunities, etc that I run across and share.

All this shakeup is the result of me needing to change gears now that I have a book coming out, and don't have as much time to browse other people's blogs as I used to. I actually still do a lot of reading of blogs in my feed, I just don't have as much time to comment.

That seems to be the case for a lot of friends (writer or otherwise) and I considered abandoning this blog entirely, but there are some gems in the archive and I poured a lot of myself into these pages.
I've opted to keep it up, with the compromise that I'm going to feel less guilty about posting on a regular basis. Who knows--that might actually make me more likely to jump in with spontaneous posts!

Word Crimes

This video from Weird Al Yankovic deserves its own post, so here you go:

Pens for Paws Auction!

The Pens for Paws Auction, benefiting a no-kill, cage-free sanctuary called Fat Kitty City, starts July 14th! If you're a writer looking to bid on a critique with agents, authors, or an editor, you should check it out. We also have signed books and ARCs up for bid, and lots of other cool stuff! Entangled Publishing and Spencer Hill Press even have packages of goodies you won't want to miss. This year, we've even added door prizes--everyone who bids each day will be entered into a drawing for a door prize book (not one of the items up for bid--this is a separate offering) that day.

The auction items will post July 14-19, and instructions on how to bid is in the comments area of each item, or go to How It Works for more help. Hope to see you all there!

California Conferences

With a debut novel coming out next year, I've been thinking about how to allocate my travel budget for conferences and literature festivals. For now, events on the West Coast have priority since it's more likely that I can find roommates and carpool buddies for these.

But I was surprised how many events there are that I've never even heard of--it seems like with Twitter and Facebook, so many things show up on our radar these days. But maybe that's the problem--it's harder to pick the relevant things out of the noise.

Most of these are for 2015, but there are still some upcoming in 2014. I've included those as a guideline for when they can expect to schedule the event for next year:

Sacramento Region:
California Capital Book Festival, Sacramento (Oct 25-26, 2014)
Wizard World Comic Con, Sacramento, Jun 19-21, 2015
SCBWI California North Central: Spring Spirit Conference: Citrus Heights, CA, May 2, 2015


SF Bay Area:
SCBWI California: San Francisco North and East Bay: Fall Conference,
(Oct 17-18, 2014)
SCBWI California: San Francisco South: Golden Gate Conference, last
weekend in Feb 2015
Litquake, San Francisco, (Oct 10-18, 2014)
ALA annual conference in San Francisco, CA June 25-30, 2015
San francisco writers conference, Feb 12-15, 2015

Northern CA:
Mendocino Coast Writer's Conference, Fort Bragg, CA (July 31-Aug 2, 2014)

Southern CA:
Big Orange Bookfest in Orange, CA (Oct 11-13, 2013?)
LA Times Festival of Books, April 18-19, 2015
Orange County Children's Book festival, Sept?
SCBWI California: Central Coast: Writer's Day, Thousand Oaks, CA (Oct.
25, 2014)
SCBWI California: Los Angeles County: Writer's Day, San Gabriel, CA
(March 22-23, 2014)
SCBWI California: San Diego: Conference and Intensive, (March 1-2, 2014)

Other West Coast states:
SCBWI Western Washington: Writing and Illustrating for Children
Conference: Redmond, WA (April 12-13, 2014)
SCBWI Oregon: Spring Conference: Wilsonville, OR, May 30-31, 2015

Did I miss any? Are you planning on going to any of these? Please share in the comments!