I’m so proud and impressed! Diane Farr attended our “Creating a Web Presence” workshop at the RWA National Conference and then went right home and built herself a site using Wordpress.com. Hooray!! I’m so glad that Michelle and I were able to be Wordpress evangelists!

If anyone else from our workshop has built a site, please let me know. I’d love to see it!

I’m happy to report that I believe my editor pitch went well! She had several ideas for pumping up my plot and I’m more than happy to incorporate them and send her a new synopsis. No names posted yet about which editor or publishing house… but hopefully in the future I’ll be able to post some good news here and be more detailed.

I really enjoyed the Golden Heart and RITA Awards Ceremony tonight. There’s something so inspirational about it! Next year I hope to see several of my friends (AND ME!) represented in the list of finalists and winners. With all of the amazingly talented friends I have in Austin RWA, it’s not a stretch to think that will happen.

Michelle and I presented our workshop today at 2 PM at the RWA National Conference and I feel like it went well. I only wish we could have had another 30 minutes! There were so many tidbits we didn’t get time to share, darnit! We had great audience questions and that made me happy. I also had one kind woman come up to me after the workshop and tell me that we made the concept understandable for her and she’s not afraid to tackle a site now. Hooray!

My plan is to add several more helpful topics and tidbits to my website next week. In addition, some of the questions we received from the audience were excellent ideas for further information. Topics I plan to cover soon:

• How (exactly) to point your domain name to your free blog
• Exact details of signing up for a free Wordpress.com or Blogger.com account
• How often should you post to your blog or update your website

If you have any further ideas for more info, please us the Contact Form to let me know! And thank you to all of you who attended our presentation!

Our speaker at today’s RWA Conference luncheon was Victoria Alexander and she was hilarious! If you ever get the chance to hear her speak, go for it! Last night I was on the elevator with both Ms. Alexander and Ms. Stephanie Laurens and I was too tongue-tied to speak to them. Now I’m kicking myself because clearly it would have been a fun chat for our 21 story descent. Drat!

At the luncheon I made a new friend, Misty from North Dakota. That’s one of my favorite things about this conference…just talking and talking to new people and hearing about what they do and how they do it and where they do it. (Get your mind out of the gutter.)

I also had the pleasure of attending Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ workshop in the afternoon and it sparked a lot of good thoughts about my current manuscript and what’s going on with it that’s just not right. Hallelujah! I’m anxious to put some of it into practice very very soon. And by that I mean, AFTER my workshop tomorrow afternoon (the butterflies are starting to awaken in my tummy) and AFTER my editor pitch on Saturday (eeek!).

What a great experience I had today at the Leadership Retreat! I learned a lot and it sparked a ton of great ideas for new things to do in our Austin chapter. I met some wonderful women and we traded good ideas and advice, which is exactly what I was hoping for. Hooray for Sharon and Leslie for putting it together!

Tonight I attended the Literacy Signing and got books from Jennifer Ashley, Sherry Thomas, Debbie Macomber and Lori Wilde. Last year I bought a lot more books, but I was within driving distance. Since I’ll have to mail back my books this time, I was a bit more conservative.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow…it’s time to get a good night’s sleep so I can be ready for all the fun.

I arrived in San Francisco this afternoon and I’m counting the hours till the conference begins! I’ll be at the registration table nice and early on Wednesday morning before the Leadership Retreat begins at 9 AM. That makes it about 36 hours till the festivities begin - hooray!

In the meantime, my daughter and I will be sight-seeing, including a trek to Alcatraz. One note about my daughter…she’s a hit here in SanFran with her newly colored blue, purple and magenta hair. This evening we walked around the shops around Union Square and she received a ton of very heartfelt compliments on her ‘do.

Thank you for visiting my new and improved site. It has been fully updated in preparation for my workshop presentation at the RWA National Conference in July, with even more content to follow shortly.

If you’d like to learn more about me, visit Meet Emma. I also have short descriptions of my manuscripts on the My Books page.

I am currently the President of the Austin chapter of the Romance Writers of America and down the right side you’ll see links to all of our great members’ sites. I hope you’ll visit a few of them.

If you’d like to drop me a line, you can leave comments here, or use the Contact Form.