Pirate Day – Katie L. Carroll

Before I get to the summer reading giveaway, I have to give a shout out to all the people who made Pirate Day happen. Thanks the members of the Downtown Milford Business Association for organizing the event. We had perfect weather and a great turnout It was so fun meeting all the little (and big!) pirates and sharing PIRATE ISLAND with them!

On a personal, level thanks to my mom for spending the whole day with me, my sisters for supplies and/or for hanging out, my nephew for stopping by and introducing me to his girlfriend, my mother-in-law for making sure The Prince (my middle kiddo) had a special shopping trip on his birthday, my dad for grabbing lunch, and my husband and kiddos for always being my biggest cheerleaders. It truly does take a village!

Now for the summer reading giveaway! I have some copies of ELIXIR BOUND with the old cover hanging around, so I’ve decided to drop them in little free libraries while on my adventures this summer. As a bonus, whoever finds one of these books will also get a code to claim an ebook ARC (advanced reader copy) of the second Elixir book ELIXIR BOUND when those are ready in the fall!

I’ve chosen most of the little free libraries already, but I’m keeping a few copies open to spontaneous giveaways. Many of the libraries are in my home state of Connecticut, but upstate New York, Virginia, and Washington D.C. are among the other spots where you’ll be able to find copies. I’ll be posting pics of the libraries as the copies are dropped off on Instagram (yup, I finally joined!) @katielcarrollauthor, Twitter @katielcarroll, and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/katielcarrollauthor/.

You can always check out what I’m reading this summer on my Goodreads page, and I’ll probably do a post later in the summer highlighting some of my favorites. What’s on your summer reading list?

It’s been all ELIXIR SAVED and author events on the blog lately and today’s no exception. I’ve been compiling the mess of a draft that is ELIXIR SAVED and it’s been slightly terrifying. It’s been 8ish-year process to write this thing, it’s got three point-of-view characters, and it turns out that the manuscript is currently over 117,000 words!!! Yikes!

It’s been a journey to say the least. I haven’t quite written THE END yet, which I was hoping to do before I started the first round of revisions. But I realized I needed to read through what I already have in order to write the ending, which is weird because I’ve known the major events of the end pretty much since I started writing the story. Some things you can’t force, I guess. As I’ve been organizing the draft, the pieces of the end are already starting to come together in my mind.

I’ve also been busy scheduling and planning events for the spring and summer. This Saturday, I’ll be at the Author Expo and Book Fair at the public library in Torrington, CT from 12-4 p.m. That means I’ll be missing the New England SCBWI conference this year. 🙁 Hopefully I’ll get there next year.

Then in June I’ll be part of Pirate Day in downtown Milford, CT. It looks like I’ll be doing two presentations about the local pirate lore, one in morning before the pirates arrive by boat and one in the afternoon on the town green. There are a ton of fun activities throughout the day for the whole family. I’ll have PIRATE ISLAND for sale, games to play, and picture opportunities when I’m not speaking. It’s going to be a really fun (and busy!) day.

I’m also part of the CT Authors Trail this summer. I’ll be at the Voluntown Public Library in August for that. You can check out my Events page for all the updated details on where to find me. And I’m always happy to have people reach out to me for events and school or library visit; check out my Author Visits page for details on that.

As for the boys, we had a fun spring break a couple of weeks ago. We’ve started making our plans for the summer. I’ll have to do a picture post soon, so you can see what we’ve been up to. What have you all been up to lately?