JDP NEWS update, April 1, 2004

I’m back from my trek to Salt Lake City, Utah, where I had to switch my wardrobe from Arizona short sleeves to Salt Lake City long sleeves and sweaters while I was there. Brrrr! As if that weren’t bad enough, it actually had the nerve to SNOW one day. My deepest sympathies to those of you still suffering from frigid weather, but there’s a reason I live in Arizona, after all, and it doesn’t include seeing snow outside my window at the end of March.


Nevertheless, I had a wonderful time soaking up knowledge to improve my writing skills at the Storymakers Writers Conference and attending the very elegant Whitney Awards Gala, even though my novel, Loyalty’s Web, did not win an award. However, Loyalty’s Web was nominated in the largest category (over 80 entries in the Women’s Fiction/Romance Category), so I remain very pleased to have landed among the top five finalists.


In other news:

Amazon is now offering Loyalty's Web at a 10% discount. If you do not already own a copy, this would be a great time to hop over to Amazon.com and snap a copy up!

Website drawing reminder: If you haven’t already entered the new drawing on my website, check out my News & Contests page there.


On the way home from Salt Lake City, I stopped at the Arizona Renaissance Festival and did a book signing for Loyalty’s Web at Lady Ann Chamberlin’s bookshop. It was a wonderful experience, meeting both readers and aspiring writers, and I’ve been invited to return next year. I’ve attended the Arizona Renaissance Festival “for fun” for all twenty years of its existence, but this is the first time I’ve dressed up in costume. Thought you might all get a kick out of seeing my Lady Joyce of Pastena attire. If you’d like to read an account of my experience at the festival, you can go to ANWA Founders & Friends and read my blog.

ANWA Founder & Friends is a blog maintained by members of the American Night Writers Association (ANWA), a writing group for LDS women and women who uphold similar standards in their writing. I blog there every other Monday. The topics are wide ranging, from writing, to family, to spiritual, to personal experience. If you’re interested in such subjects, you might like to check out ANWA Founder & Friends to see where our ramblings take us.

Finally, in other blogging news, for those of you who follow my medieval research with joyce blog, I will regrettably be cutting back my blogs to once a month for the foreseeable future. The reason? I am beginning work on the final revisions of my spinoff to Loyalty’s Web, tentatively titled Illuminations of the Heart. Needless to say, this will be consuming a great deal of my free time, hence my need to cut back on other projects a bit. However, once I have completed my revisions, I hope to resume a twice monthly blog on my medieval research site, with both continuing posts on my research for Loyalty’s Web, as well as new posts on researching Illuminations of the Heart.

Well, that’s it for now! I wish a blessed spring for you all, and a swift thaw for those of you still struggling in the cold! May April bring you many warm and happy days.