Of Blogging, Speaking, Signing and Traveling

A number of great things from this week!

Wednesday I was the guest author on the Petticoats and Pistols blog, talking about forts and why some were still about and some were gone. P&P was founded by a group of women who write romance set in the Wild West and I got some GREAT questions from the group. It was a fun day answering them and getting more exposure for the book - Mary Connealy of P&P said they got around 2,300 hits for the day which is phenomenal!

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I followed up with an email to Mary Yager from the Nebraska Humanities Council this week - I had been asking about getting added to the council's speakers list and she came to see me at Lee Booksellers in Lincoln last Sunday.

Well, she apparently liked the program - she said she'd be sending me a speaker's agreement in the mail soon! This is a BIG deal - the NHC is the source for speakers in Nebraska if you want to know its history and heritage, and to be asked to join them is GREAT for my budding career (and isn't it nice to be "budding" at 50?) I'm coming right at the tail end of their putting together the current list for the speakers bureau as well; they only do this every two to three years, and the "auditions" concluded earlier this summer. Mary made an exception in my case since the forts are so essential to the history of the state, so I am VERY appreciative.
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Had a great signing at my brother Rodger's Borders store at 132nd and West Maple last night. They were already low in inventory before the signing, so I brought my own inventory to sell and ended up selling in the double digits. A couple friends stopped by - Lori Grinvalds from my hometown of Yutan and Tim Ryan from my wife's workplace. Business REALLY dropped off for the second half, though - must have been the debate keeping people home!
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I'm off to Minnesota for the weekend - visiting the family cabin, but stopping to visit museums and historical organizations on the way up and back to "spread the gospel" of Forts! This week is also my presentation on the "Lost Forts of the Northern Plains" for my Westerners group to which I am REALLY looking forward - I expect I'll have some things they haven't seen or heard of before!