First, I\u00a0must thank\u00a0my wonderful family and\u00a0great friends, as well as the\u00a0book-lovers and dedicated volunteers who, despite the relentless rain, were there\u00a0to support the 2016 Gaithersburg Book Festival. A very special thanks to my friend, Maryetta, who braved I-95 and drove down from New Jersey for the event. Thank you, thank you, thank you one and all!<\/p>\n
This\u00a0was my first time as a featured author at the Festival and I had a great time connecting\u00a0with readers and other authors.\u00a0As a fiction\u00a0writer I spend a lot of time alone making up people and their stories so, it’s exceptional\u00a0when you have the opportunity to get out and experience\u00a0how your writing resonates with real people. I met a woman whose daughter sent her a copy of Provenance<\/em>. This woman flew in from the Midwest to meet me at the Festival so that I could sign her copy of my book. She told me that she thought the book was important,\u00a0that she had learned about passing<\/em>, a\u00a0part of the African American experience that she knew nothing about. She thanked me for writing such a beautiful book; that was pretty special, so I thanked her too.<\/p>\n I think writers, by nature, are not all that comfortable talking about themselves or their books, I know that’s true for me.\u00a0I also know that meeting and interacting with readers\u00a0is a vital part of being of being published\u00a0and\u00a0I’m working on getting more comfortable with that\u00a0aspect of being an author. I’m hard at work on the next book in the Provenance<\/em> series so the interest and enthusiasm I experienced that day will help me stay the course with Promise.<\/em>\u00a0If my experience at\u00a0Gaithersburg Book Festival\u00a0is an example what’s to come, I think I’m going to like this author\u00a0thing!<\/p>\n If you weren’t able to make it to this year’s\u00a0Festival, I’ve posted\u00a0a brief video from\u00a0my presentation (if you listen closely you can hear the raindrops cascading on the tent). The rain didn’t stop\u00a0us for a second! Check out the\u00a0moisture defying smiles and styles in photos on the Gaithersburg Book Festival Facebook page<\/a>.<\/p>\n