ACFW Recap 1

I don’t think I’m going to be able to do a day-by-day recap of everything that happened in the week that I was in Minnesota, but I will try to hit the highlights.

After I spent several days in Rochester with Erica and her family (will post about that later this week—including photos from our visit to the Spam Museum in Austin, MN), we drove over to “the Cities” (actually, the suburb of Bloomington) where the conference was to take place. One of the first things we did was go to the airport to pick up several people: Brandilyn Collins, “Mama” Ruth Seamonds, Rose McCauley, agent Sandra Bishop, and DCCP Georgiana Daniels. Here Erica and I are with Mama Ruth at baggage claim:

Our Keynote Speaker for the conference was best-selling author Angela Hunt:

And, as she has been since the first ACRW conference in 2002, best-selling author Brandilyn Collins served as our emcee:

Author Rachel Hauck did a wonderful job of putting together the worship times and leading us in singing:

And here I am with authors Patty Smith Hall (who won the Historical Romance category of the Genesis Contest) and Rachel Hauck, the two women who are responsible for encouraging me to join ACRW when I met them back in April 2001 at the Blue Ridge conference:

Thursday night, after the opening keynote address, I went to the “Start Your Writing Career with Barbour” late night chat. Here are our three beloved Barbour editors: Susan Downs, Rebecca Germany, and JoAnne Simmons:

Friday morning, I had the honor of giving the devotional to help get the first full day of conference off to a running start:

After a day of stuffing all the knowledge into our heads as we could (and I spent two hours helping Ronie Kendig keep the editor/agent appointments running smoothly), I went to the Mall of America for dinner with some of my Nashville gals (JM Hochstetler, Krista Phillips, and Esther Gross). After that, I went to the aquarium for the Barbour authors event.

Here I am with author Kelly Hake:

And here’s Tiff Stockton, who writes HeartSongs as Amber Miller, riding the giant statue of a tortoise at the aquarium:

The rest of my MOA/aquarium photos can be seen here.

So that gets us through Friday night. Tomorrow, I’ll post photos from the massive book signing at the Mall of America, and Thursday, I’ll post photos from the banquet. Hope you’ll come back to see what a good time we had!