"Sorry I missed your call. I was playing fetch with my cat Hush."

October 2024 paid newsletter

Yep. That’s a real thing I said to a librarian this morning when I returned her call.

Just try to find anyone more professional.

My gosh, though. Hush loves that ball.

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Holy cats. It’s October already.

Book releases will sneak up on you if you let them. Like a lot of exciting dates on the calendar, they seem far away, soooo far away . . . and then they’re right there and you’re behind on everything.

And while I definitely think I will have some of that, I’ve been working hard to prepare as many things as possible so that I’m not completely overwhelmed on release week. I already know that week will be really busy: I’ve scheduled a local festival, a book release event, a school visit, a library visit, and I will be judging entries in a contest. And I think I’ll have another school visit the week after.

Anyway, that’s why I decided to start updating my presentation while I was getting all that scheduled. Last month! Weeks before I would actually need them. And, not to brag, but I also found the connecty thing that goes from my computer to a projector. I looked for it before I was on my way out the door.

Please hold your applause. We have a lot to cover today, because I’m going to share (some of) my presentation with you.

Past Me was actually pretty decent at building presentations and keeping them organized for Future (now Present) Me. Thanks, Past Me! But it’s been a few years since I’ve used them, so . . . updates are needed. Plus, I’ve also learned a lot about design and photography (things I didn’t think I would need to know about as an author!), so it was time to make things cuter!

For the school and library visits, I already had the basic structure of the presentation I’ll be using. But I needed to update my bio section with the books that have come out since I last used this.

Originally, I had a page for every series, but that’s . . . starting to turn into a lot — especially since I’ll be doing these visits for BYE FOREVER, I GUESS, which is a middle grade. (That doesn’t mean some of the audience won’t be interested in my other books, but I don’t want to spend too much time going through them.) So I reorganized them to save time and space, as well as keep the focus on BYE FOREVER, I GUESS. I put both of my trilogies on one page, along with a few keywords/tropes about those, my duologies on another page, and then the Janies/Marys on another page. I cut the time I’ll spend on those in half.

BYE FOREVER, I GUESS gets its own slide, of course.

Globally, I tried to make the entire thing a little more fun to look at. The background used to be plain white — boring! So I replaced it with a photo I took a while ago (and made it translucent so it’s not distracting). I updated text, images and examples I wanted to share, and replaced a bunch of images I’d borrowed from the internet with photos of my cats.

Oh yeah, and I’ll introduce my cats in the beginning of they’re basically part of my brand now and they need to pull their weight.

I’ve given this presentation to high schoolers before, but while I was working on it this time, I tried to keep in mind that I’d be talking to middle schoolers, so I really wanted to make sure it was fun, a little silly, and kind of interactive. I’ll talk more about that in a minute.

And though I’ll continue working on this over the next few weeks, here’s what the first part of the presentation looks like: