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!

WriteOnCon

Today is the last day for WriteOnCon, so I thought I'd better stop lurking on the site and join the forum. I commented on several posts on Tuesday, but just couldn't keep up with all the good stuff. Now I'm having to play catchup on all the workshops as well as responding to threads on the forum.

The best part is, except for the live events, I don't have to keep up. They archive everything, so you can go back and read and/or watch workshops at your leisure. This is a great idea, because it's difficult to digest all this information at once.

I'm seeing a lot of Absolute Write names on the WOC forums, I guess they share participants. If you'd like to join us, go to http://writeoncon.com/2011/08/gearing-up-for-writeoncon-2011-%E2%80%93-the-full-schedule/ or http://writeoncon.com/forum/ for the forums.

So thank you, WriteOnCon organizers, for providing this valuable service. For free, a bonus to starving writers everywhere!

Guest Post on WOW!'s Blog

A warm welcome, to everyone who navigated to my blog from the Muffin, WOW! Women on Writing's blog. :)

And for readers of my blog, hop on over and read my guest post. While you're there, check out their great resources for writers on the blog and in their e-zine.

Happy weekend, everybody! And here's a Friday bonus book trailer (I've only read up to the 2nd book, so now I really have some catching up to do)

The Power of Social Networking: It Can Move Floors

So I'm on facebook, I have this blog, I have my art website, but I'm dragging my feet on joining Twitter. I've found the Twitter pages where I can stalk some agents, but I haven't set up my own account yet. Mainly for the time constraints--as you can tell, my two-three-times weekly blog posts fell to occasionally-weekly when I was wrassling my rewrites.

Twitter seems like it would be fun, but time-consuming as well. And apparently there are politics to worry about, too. It just hasn't gotten to a tipping point yet where I think it's worth it.

And then, a local mall got hit with a flash mob. I actually know a person in one of the choirs, and she was telling people for weeks ahead of time about the secret upcoming spontaneous event. Of course as a writer, I had to argue the semantics of calling a planned event of this magnitude a spontaneous event, but the official designation was "Random Act of Musical Kindness."

I also questioned how it could be a secret if she's telling everyone. She said, "I have to tell my friends, and the more the merrier." Well apparently the organizers did not allow for the Twitter factor: a secret told to one friend, or even an overheard conversation, can spread like a fire (okay, that was a bad analogy, considering the mall was hit by a fire last month) with the power of Twitter.

And like the old shampoo commercial, where friends tell friends ad infinitum, the crowd of participants and performers swelled to 5,000--when they had only planned for 500. That's some pretty powerful tweeting, even if it did turn out pretty scary for all the people that got caught up in the crowd and had to be evacuated.

New Preston Castle Pix

I posted my newest Preston Castle Pix--enjoy!

Resources for Writers

Poets & Writers Magazine is celebrating forty years, and their website has grown into a valuable resource. Along with making some of their articles available online, they have a database for job listings, literary markets, and grants and awards.

This last one, the grants and awards (including contests), is what I find so helpful. You can filter by entry fee, genre, and deadline.

The Absolute Write forum is a phenomenal resource; I lurked for years and finally signed on last year. I've made some wonderful contacts, gotten helpful critiques (and hopefully reciprocated in a useful way), and heard about books that I otherwise might have entirely missed.

In the Young Adult forum, they've started a blogroll, and they do a Teaser Tuesday, with members posting a link to a short excerpt from their work. I will be participating for the first time tomorrow.