The Maker of the Treats!

The other night I took my PYRAMID of RICE KRISPIES TReATS to the Scout Court of Honor, and one of the boys said, "Wow, Sister Griffith. Are you the Maker of the Treats?"

Why, yes. Yes, I am. In fact, I'd really like a t-shirt that says this.

I'm still plugging away at my edits. Just a couple dozen pages to go! I can almost smell the cake I'm going to make for myself when I'm done. Mmm. Chocolate. The recipe from the side of the Hershey's Cocoa can, with the frosting recipe from it, too. (That delicious frosting has officially turned me into a Frosting Snob. I can never again appreciate a canned frosting.)

The Cake of My Editing Accomplishment Dreams

Of course, naturally I'll only be eating ONE BITE of this delicious cake, since I'm not eating sugar anymore. Well, not very much sugar, anyhow.

When I was 19 I worked in the Pepperidge Farm Cookie Factory for a summer. Perhaps I've mentioned this before. Well, the point of it was to earn money to spend on a trip to Europe with my roommates. I spent a lot of my time there looking like Lucille Ball in the candy factory, and probably cost the company more money than I made for them. It was a bit of a disaster. However, my sweet Dad put a poster on my wall: "As you work, think 'Eur-ope, Eur-ope, Eur-ope, Yurrr-up!'" It really helped.

Then the trip was the incentive for the cookie work. Now, the cake is the incentive for the writing work.

I work well with incentives.

WriteOnCon! Free Writers Conference Today! + a Pepperidge Farm Surprise

This week (Tues-Thurs) there's a free writing conference online. I spent yesterday eating waaay too many goldfish crackers and reading forums and watching vlogs by editors and agents and top authors.

It's been really helpful and inspiring. One class featured advice on great first lines of novels. (Thank you xxx. I'm going now to tweak my first line.) Another was a vlog (video log) by Beth Revis, the NYT Bestselling author of Across the Universe, about failure and success.

The forum with agent Sara Megibow was filled with great advice on how to build a platform. (What's that? It's basically an online presence.) She gave her opinions on the best way to go about that, and how not to be afraid of jumping in.

There was a very touching presentation by author Alan Silberberg about drawing from memory, and how he was able to mine his own emotions and past to create a middle grade comic strip type book, Milo: Sticky Notes & Brain Freeze, with a lot of heart and depth. Loved that.

It's primarily geared toward authors and aspiring authors who write Young Adult or Middle Grade novels or to those who write or illustrate picture books. However, I have found it useful in dozens of ways so far. Those who write for an adult audience won't be sorry they checked it out.

One of the coolest features of WriteOnCon is the option to put your query up for critique. Any participant can give you feedback, and hundreds of queries will get feedback from agents, editors, and other professionals. Shoooooweeee that's cool.

The organizers really did a spectacular job lining up true professionals and talent. If you haven't already logged onto it, you can still go over there and access all the information.

Did I mention the best part? It's FREE. Yup. Totally free. You can donate if you like, but there's no obligation.

So, how many goldfish crackers did I down during said sessions? Let's just say, I had the BIG CARTON nearby. Last month I stopped by the Pepperidge Farm Cookie Factory (a place I was fortunate to have a summer job during college. Mmmm.) They have a thrift/seconds store, and I got myself quite an array of Pepperidge Farm finery. White chocolate chunks? Yessiree. Mint Milanos? Who can resist those?

The best surprise was the goldfish, though. Now not only do they come in orange and parmesan and rainbow flavor, those little fishies have a brown cousin:

CHOCOLATE GRAHAM CRACKER!


It's like goldfish and choco teddy grahams had a love child.

I love them.

And you'll love WriteOnCon. Don't delay! Check it out NOW!