Fabulous First Friday and the Spiritual Arts Fair

I have been putting a lot of time and energy lately into being on the committee for a new venture in Oneonta: Fabulous First Fridays. The idea here (which has been done very succesfully elsewhere) is to have a number of arts and culture related events on the first Friday of every month to draw people downtown.

The kick-off date was last Friday, May 7th, and it went pretty well. The Artisans' Guild (the shop I run and have my jewelry at) held a "Meet the New Artists" reception, featuring the seven artists and craftspeople who had joined the shop in the last year. Here's a pic of me chatting with a few of the other artist-members of The Guild.



The next day, Saturday the 8th, was the 6th annual Spiritual Arts Fair, held at the local UU Church. I took a bunch of books to sign, and did mini-tarot readings all day long. That's a fun activity--but a lot more draining than you might think, especially when you run into a streak of people with real issues, as I did this year. Still, at least I could help.

The highpoint of the day for me was getting to hang out with Pagan author pal Gail Wood [check out her books, if you haven't already and you're interested in Witchcraft--they're wonderful!] and blogger Rebecca Elson from the Magical Buffet http://www.themagicalbuffet.com/. Both ladies live just far enough away that I only get to see them on rare occasions. So this was a real treat.



That's Rebecca on my left, and Gail on my right. The next time we'll be together will be at major multi-author booksigning event that Rebecca is putting together for the Barnes and Noble in Saratoga, on September 11th. I can't wait!

Of course, the downside of all this activity was that it seriously cut into my writing time.

Twitch, twitch.

Luckily, I made up for it with an unusually productive burst on Sunday, ending up with 5K words by the time the day was over. That's possibly a personal best for me (I usually average 1,500-2,000 words in a day). This puts me well over the 2/3rd mark on the manuscript at 68,500 words. I'm aiming for about 88K, which should take me about 2 weeks to hit, if all goes well.

I'll keep you posted!