ANWA Report -- Saturday, March 1st -- The Conference

Saturday was gorgeous -- warm and balmy. Kerry, Kathy and I got up and got ready without too much fighting over the bathroom, and we were out the door. We drove to the nearby town of Gilbert to Eagle's Aerie School (what a cool name is that!) and met up with the other members of ANWA.

My class was in the first block, and I didn't get any pictures of that, but the coolest thing did happen. Dan from Thoughts on LDS and Autumn from Autumn Ables were both there, and I got to meet them. They're both just as cool in person as they are on their blogs! This was a definite highlight of the weekend for me.

This is Kerry with her props from her class on structuring a scene. I hadn't ever thought about it before, but everything she said made total sense.

Taking a picture of Marsha, who's taking a picture of me.

I got to meet fabulous author Liz Adair, who has been an Internet friend but I've never met her in person until that day.

Lunch buddies Linda and Heather, and the gentleman to the right is Dan. Heather has her own line of scrapbook products, how cool is that! About halfway through the meal, we were joined by Sarah Hinze, another favorite author of mine. And yes, I was seriously having fun.

Kathy presented on "Line Upon Line" and also on "How to Stay Out of the Slush Pile." She gave me a lot to think about and they were both great classes.

Here I am presenting my second class. It was supposed to be the same presentation I gave in the morning, only to a different group, but my pages got out of order after the first class and what with everything else going on, I never did have a good chance to get them all put back. When I got into the second class, I discovered that I really didn't have anything in the right place and did a lot of ad-libbing, but apparently each class got what each class was supposed to get -- people came up to me after each class and said they'd heard exactly what they needed. Go figure! Dan and Autumn both had nothing but nice things to say about me . . . I'm blushing!

After all the presentations were done for the day, we met back in the main room and had a book signing. I met so many wonderful people there, and I bought a book from a new Covenant author named Sandra Grey. Her book, "Traitor," is so amazing, she seriously scares me. No one is going to want my books after reading hers. I'll give a link to the review when I've written it so you can see in detail how much I loved this book.

I looked around for Autumn -- I wanted a picture and to say goodbye, but she had to leave and I didn't see her again. She's coming to the LDStorymakers Conference in a couple of weeks, though, so she will definitely have some posing to do then.

After the conference, I went out to dinner with the ANWA presidency. I'm serious, I was fed more good food this weekend, and I realized that when I'm at home, I really don't take the time to feed myself regularly. Then back to the apartment, getting ready for bed, and packing up most of my things to fly out on Sunday. It had been such an incredible day -- I didn't want for it to come to an end.

More later . . .