A Literary Weekend

This is about 3/4 of the books we bought.
We budgeted a much smaller amount for
buying books, the laughed and laughed
and laughed.

If you've ever wanted to walk through an endless aisle of books, pass by the occasional author hurrying off to an event or signing, and make really difficult decisions between different workshops happening at the same time, then Tucson Festival of Books was basically made for you.

You may also call it heaven on earth. Reader's choice.

Heaven on earth is crowded, overrun with people walking from tent to tent and toting canvas bags crammed full of books they never knew they needed. Crowded, and wholly wonderful. There are many things for which I will not deal with a crowd. Literature is certainly not one of those things.

I met and spoke with authors, attended a workshop with literary agent (gotta up that query game, yo), and learned how to make a comic book with my kids. And if you're wondering, no, I could not think of anything better than, "I loved this book so much! I'm reading your first one now! I'm so excited to meet you!" to Celeste Ng.

Other than a mountain of books and a blown budget, I came away from this Festival with something even more valuable - motivation. A push to keep working and trying and doing. I recently started attending a local writing group and sending off chapters for my BFF aka beta reader, doubling down on efforts to get This is Now whipped into shape.

And maybe the best part of the whole damn thing? When my husband smiled and said, "One year it'll be you signing your book."

That and getting this really sweet note of encouragement from Janet Fitch.

I've been feeling kind of down about not hitting some of my goals. But honestly, it's only two goals I'm struggling with: journaling and blogging. Otherwise, I'm all on track! I'm on track with revisions. I'm on track with running (crushed a 10k recently). I'm on track with using my daily planner, reading, becoming a better baker. So I'm going to focus on what I am doing well, and giving myself space to figure out the other things I'm struggling with.

Did anyone else do anything fun this weekend, or have any goals that you're crushing?