Community Spotlight 3/21

Jul 252 min read

SheaCon 2024: Wrap Up

SheaCon 2024 was last weekend and it's time to share the panel audio recordings!

But first I want to give a big thank you to all the Champions for attending, and for being such an amazing group! All of the panels and activities had great participation. It was so much fun to hang out with, laugh, and celebrate books with everyone, which is what the goal for Sheacon has always been.

Every year I also thank the Sheacon Planners–without them none of this would have happened, and they not only started organizing everything months ago they also have worked hard to make Sheacon smoother/more professional every year. Additionally, they acted as hosts for panels/events/games during Sheacon! They bravely kept up the conversation while running panels, organizing the group games, running the Retha and Dragons (or FATE) sessions, showing us all elf dancer stretches, and more.

Thank you so much to Akira, Anneli, Amanda, Ayrin, Batattack, Bluefires, Chelsea, Cheybri, Cindy, Cwang, Eleniel, Ellie, Emarynn, FrogPrincess994, Gwen, Jordan, Kamashida, Kimberly, LouBerry, Miriel, Prolly, QoP, Rachel, RayJay, RoseTen, Vin, and Zooknar. You guys are the best!

This is also the perfect chance to thank and salute our Chief Sheacon Planner, Cindy. Cindy puts in serious hours organizing the conference–the scheduling she has to figure out months in advance is intense! She’s pretty much a professional chaos wrangler, and I’m so grateful for her.

Finally, I want to thank our Director of Discord, Vin, and the Mod Squad– Smasher, Batattack, Cimorrene, and Rog–for helping all the new members in our discord server who joined so they could attend Sheacon, and our Facebook Mods–Megen, Sarah, and Jocelyn–who kept our community Facebook Group informed in the lead up to Sheacon!

Also, a big thank you to Melanie Cellier, Deborah Grace White, Shari L Tapscott, and Brittany Fichter who were our guest authors this year with a special call out to author Kimberly Rogers who hosted our relationship analysis panel.

Panel Recordings

Finally, for those of you who missed out on attending in person there are audio recordings of all the main panels! Our diligent Sheacon Planners recorded these so you can listen to them at your leisure! (If you enjoyed these recordings, please leave a quick comment thanking the Sheacon Planners!)

Feb 91 min read

FebFest 2024

Updated: Jul 5

Every summer we have SeaCon which is a fan organized event hosted on Discord with guest authors and fun activities. Last year we experimented with a mini event in February and this year the SheaCon Planners are bringing back the fun! You can look forward to fun activities like bingo and trivia!

Here's a special message direct from the planners with all the details: Come one, come all to SheaCon FebFest 2024! For a few hours only, Kitty’s discord server will be hosting special Sheacon activities. We hope to see you there on Saturday, February 24th starting at 1 pm US Central time. The channels for the event will magically appear here on Kitty’s server when it is time to party. If you haven’t joined Kitty’s discord server yet, learn how to here! Sadly, I (Kitty) will not be attending FebFest this year because I will still be frantically working on the final book in the Magic on Main Street series. But it will still be an amazing time and there will be a lot of fun things you can do even if you haven't read all my books. I hope you have a blast!

Nov 6, 20232 min read

NaNoWriMo 2023

Updated: Jun 19

November is here which means means NaNoWriMo–or National Novel Writing Month–has begun!

I’m so excited that this year (for the first time in years) I will actually be writing a book during November so I get to participate! (Sort of…I’m frantically plotting and editing right now, but hopefully I’ll begin writing in a few days!)

But first, what is NaNoWriMo? National Novel Writing Month is an event started in 1999 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel in thirty days (the month of November). The global event is run by the official NaNoWriMo nonprofit organization–which means it is also FREE to sign up and join in the fun. If you signup you get a nifty tracker and some fun discounts if you “win” and write 50,000 words by the end of November.

Even though NaNoWriMo focuses on writing a 50,000 word novel, you can work on any project you want! In the past, some participants work on D&D campaigns, journaling, school papers, or writing/planning out a comic book, so you can put your own unique spin on the month!

If you decide to join me and embark on the wonderful journey of writing a novel in a month I have some resources to share with you to help you!

Author Resources webpage
Blog Posts with the Writing Tips category
My Pinterest Board for Writing Tips (this Pinterest board has links to my blog post and other writing tips from other authors)

And thanks to our Discord Community Manager Vin, you don’t have to officially sign up for NaNoWriMo to join in on have fun!

Vin is going to be hosting writing sprints multiple times a week throughout the month of November on Discord (See link for instructions on how to sign up for our community Discord if you haven’t already) The dates and times of Vin’s writing sprints are listed below, and they’ll be held in the “Writing Sprints” channel of our server.

You don’t have to work on a fun writing project if you want to join in Vin’s sprints! If you are finishing homework, studying, or have a work project you really need to focus on please feel free to join. I will try to pop in for a couple of of Vin’s sprints throughout the month so I hope to see you there!

2023 NaNoWriMo Writing Sprint Schedule Monday, Wednesday, and Friday sprints will be at 2:00 PM (2pm Central). Thursday sprints will be at 8:00 PM (8pm Central).