Last week was a whirlwind of work and summer fun, but I don’t think people want to hear about grant writing (unless you do, just let me know in the comments). For fun, I spent the weekend at my family’s cabin to celebrate Emily Day’s. Emily is a small city in Northern Minnesota that holds an annual celebration that includes a parade, delicious food vendors (GYROS!), artisans, and is capped off with fireworks. The parade is the staple of the event, but I was more interested in the food and artisans.

They had 12-foot tables lined with hats, knives, and other random knick knacks. It had an old-time redneck vibe, but it was really fun to just see all it had to offer. The biggest surprise at the event was a video game re-seller that had the full spectrum of games available from SNES to Xbox One. I did some snooping and found the game, Blitz, which was quite a nostalgia moment for me. What stood out the most at the Emily Day’s event was a self-published author by the name of M.E. Gryffon. What I found odd was she was dressed in a black Chinese dress, which I had only seen worn by Fanny Wong in Shanghai Knights. I took some time to chat with her and decided to support a fellow author. I bought her novel, "Rune of the Guardian" for only $10.

I haven’t read the book yet, but I am interested to see if the novel is a diamond in the rough instead of a just…rough. I looked around online to see if the writer had a website or something and all I could find was a single Goodreads review of three stars. She just launched the book, so I am going to take the review as a potentially positive sign and give it a shot.

Overall, the weekend was a success and I was able to get a lot of uninterrupted writing done. I was away from my normal writing laptop, so I started on a nerdy teen romance short story that I hope to have ready for everyone to read in the monthly newsletter.

If you are interested in reading it, sign-up for the newsletter, otherwise I will post it to the website a few weeks later. -J.J.