Monday Blog Post: July Starts with a Bang!

Mayor Evans, Connie Cockrell, Payson Book Festival Day Proclamation. Photo, Marie Fasano

Mayor Evans and Connie Cockrell with the Payson Book Festival Day Proclamation. Photo by Marie Fasano

On July 2nd, as the Chair for the Payson Book Fesitval, I received a Proclamation from the Town of Payson Mayor, Kenny Evans. The proclamation declares July 25th, the day of our book festival to be Payson Book Festival Day! You can see me and the Mayor in the above picture, shaking hands.

There’s only 19 more days until the festival and we’re hot and heavy into the marketing part of the event. Our Media committee member, Marie Fasano, has sent small articles to all of the major magazines in Arizona for their Calendar sections. She’s set up all of these interviews on radio and TV I’ve been posting about and she’s sent articles about our participating authors to their hometown newspapers to run. Marie has been doing a fantastic job. I hope you can make it to Payson on July 25th, 9am – 4pm, and stop by the festival to say hello!

If you missed any of the interviews or media releases or want to read the proclamation, click here to find everything.

It having been the 4th of July weekend I feel obligated to share that hubby and I went to a friend’s house and watched the fireworks from there. One of hubby’s pictures of the show is below. Our town does a great 4th of July festival in Green Valley park: children’s games and contests, food vendors, live music and then, a thirty-minute fireworks display.

Payson, Fireworks, Randy Cockrell

Payson Fireworks by Randy Cockrell

I’m still working on my Mystery at the Fair edits. After that will be the CreateSpace and Smashwords formatting and the release. I’m still shooting for the end of this week to finish the edits and then spend next weekend formatting and releasing. Cross your fingers for me, every one.

July is also a Camp NaNo month. As of today I have over 10,000 words. I completed the first draft of my short story for the Forward Motion anthology. Now I’m working on the second Jean Hays series book, Mystery in the Woods. When will it be out, you ask? No idea. I have two other books, that I wrote in April, waiting for editing. Maybe you can tell I’m not as enthusiastic about the editing and rewriting part as I am about writing the first draft.

My tomatoes have finally begun a serious growth spurt. I put the trellis for them up a few days ago and already they’re growing through the loops. The Sungold cherry tomato has tomatoes on it but still green. The rest of the plants are blossoming. Two of the six plants were volunteers that I dug up and put in the tomato bed. I can’t wait to see what they are!

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Lost Rainbows released January 25th! I’m pretty excited about it. You can buy it and my other books at: Apple, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, or Smashwords today! If you’ve read any of my books, please drop a review on the site where you bought it. It’s a big help to me in the book rankings each vendor uses to promote their books. Thanks in advance.