ELEVATED is a Winner!

Okay, so I'm super-excited to announce that the cover of ELEVATED won the Judges' Choice Award during the Indie Author Hub's Indie Rev Awards cover contest! (I know that's a lot of words. Basically, the cover won. *grins*)

The cover of ELEVATED was chosen as the winner from dozens of Indie-published titles, by giants in the Indie cover-creating world Damon Za, Fiona Jade, Covers by Ramona, and Dane Low.

You can see all the winners of the 2014 Indie Rev Award cover contest here.

The genius Erin at Erin Summerill Photography shot and designed the cover.

Winner!

And we're kicking off the new year with a winner!

The official Elana Johnson Know-It-All and winner of a $25 gift certificate to Amazon.com is...

Congrats Katie! I'll be emailing you. Happy New Year, everyone!

And The Winner Is...

This past weekend, I launched a Twitter campaign to get the word out about From the Query to the Call. One lucky writer has won a FREE ebook!

And the winner is...

Casey McCormick!!!

(And sidenote: Casey runs an awesome blog, so if you're not following her, dude, you so should be.)

So Casey, email me and I'll get you the goods, okay? Okay. elana (at) elanajohnson.com.

Stay tuned! From the Query to the Call will be officially released in one hour.

Mindless Musings Wins the PremioDardos Blog Award!

Can I get a woot! woot! (Woot! Woot!)

Anyway, Lady Glamis over at The Innocent Flower gave me the PremioDardos blog award. And let me just say that I would blog if my mother was my only follower. Sadly, my mother doesn't even know what a blog is, and she would never understand the word "woot." But I adore blogging so much, and I'm so glad that all of you are here to traverse (oooh, big word points!) on this journey that is Mindless Musings.

I guess I'm supposed to award it to 15 people. I thought that was a lot. I feel like I barely know 15 people. But here's my best shot. I really try to follow everyone who follows me, as well as everyone who follows the QueryTracker blog. I wasn't kidding the other day when I said I follow, like, a billion blogs. I may joke about some things, but never blogging. *stern face*

Anyway, here's my list of Bloggers Made of Win:
1. Lisa and Laura Roecker at Lisa and Laura Write
2. Carolyn Kaufman over at Archetype Writing
3. H.L. Dyer's Trying to do the Write Thing
4. Kate Karyus Quinn at The Lover's, The Dreamers, and Me
5. Beth Revis at Writing It Out
6. Rebecca at Gibber Jabber and Sometimes Useful Nonsense
7. Gretchen McNeil at Seanchai
8. Cathy Bryant at Word Vessel
9. Jessica Verday at Jibberings
10. Christine Fonseca at The Musings of Christine Fonseca
11. Brian Kell at The Eyeball Afterlife
12. Carrie Harris at The Wonder That Is My Blog
13. Emily Murdoch at Lefty In My Write Mind
14. Stephanie Boman at You Can Read My Mind
15. Annie Louden at Annie Writes About Writing

Phew! That's it! Oh, wait! Here's the award.


I guess if you've just "won" this prestigious award, you're supposed to blog it out, pick 15 of the blogs you can't live without, and pass on the love. Of course, this is purely optional. I mean, I'm not on blog patrol today.

And the Winner is...

The Getting to Know You contest was sure a lot of fun. I loved reading about what you all write, what you like to eat, and what you do when you're not online blogging. So, without further ado, the winner is...

Janyece!

You've won TANTALIZE by Cynthia Leitich Smith! Please email me at elanajohnson at gmail dot com with your name and mailing address and I'll get this bad boy in the mail.

Thanks for entering everyone! I love doing contests...but my biggest problem is knowing what people want to win. So, I thought I'd ask. What do you want to win? Books? Query letter critiques? What?

Comment Contest Winner!

This was so much fun for me! If you didn't see my first post on how all this comment-wackiness came about, check it out here and here.

So onto the contest! There were many funny entries. I loved them all.

Like this one by Lisa. "I am not allowed to eat burnt toast, it gives me the RESHIES." It's a standing joke with my family that I eat my toast "burnt." It's so not burnt. It's simply brown. Yet I've been teased about "burning my toast" for twelve years. So the inside joke is pretty durn funny.

Mandie cracks me up just because of who she is. Her comment was priceless. "Gramma wished me Mazel Tov while I was sitting on my tuchus in the SMAZI--oy vey!" Even though I'm not entirely sure what it means, she had me at tuchus and then that oy vey! LOL.

Now, I'm really torn. I'm going to choose a winner from the five finalists below.

1. I loved Mary Lindsey's comment. "CONANTER the Barbarian gazed dolefully at his broadsword as he donned the pale pink tu-tu, regretting the loss of the bet with his older brother, Conan." I mean, how funny is that?

2. But I love Cole Gibsen's too. Another inside thing, but it is FUN-nee. "nonsc –verb (used with object)
1. Nonsc is what LOL cats do when their mouths are too sticky with peaunut butter to nom." And I sorta think she should get bonus points for defining that it's a verb. That went a long way in my teacher book.

3. Archetype had me at "Dude." Usually anything with "dude" will win me over. "Dude, have you seen those awesome GRASTSHI hedges they used to write Elana's name?"

4. Then Authoress joined the party with "MENAR at the root of every evil in a woman's life." Couldn't. Stop. Laughing. Then she posted "Indiana Smith, archaeological hero wannabe, burst into the chamber, startling the bound and blindfolded heroine, who cried, "UNTSTI me, you fool!"" Indiana Smith? Awe-some! UNTSTI me? Holy made of awesome.

5. And Ali's "I'm an idiot and cannot think of an hillarious way to use the word FIGHTIVE so I giveupive." made my day. I'm going to have to start putting -ive at the end of everythingive. Or maybe notive. LOL.


And the winner is...Mary Lindsey! I just can't get over CONANTER. I sorta want to name my next hero Conanter. He could go by "Co" for short. Or "Nanter." Now that's funny!

Mary wins the $10 Barnes and Noble gift card! Yay! Email me at elanajohnson (at) gmail (dot) com for instructions...WOOT!

And the Winner is...

I know, I know. It's taken me forever to get to the contest. I'm sure you've all been on pins and needles wondering who's going to win, how old I really am, etc. Pshaw. Here's a picture of what I've been up to this week.


Sorry, the whole number-generator is way down on my list. I mean, did you see that cake? My daughter l-o-v-e-s Spongebob and her birthday was yesterday. She's four now. That cake took me forever. I only have two words: crumb coat.

Anyway, here's the scoop. I am 31. Hmm, whaddya know? Admitting that is easier than I thought.

And the winner: Kate Karyus Quinn! Yay! My blog chain buddy. Email me at elanajohnson at gmail dot com with your address and I'll mail out your books. But...I seriously don't have the guts to brave the post office this close to Christmas. So...if you won't hate me forever, I might wait to mail them until after. Sound good? If you're going to die, let me know in the email. I'd hate to be responsible for the death of a fellow writer, awesome blog chainer, and general all-around uber-cool person.

I Iz Winner?

Dude, National Novel Writing Month is over. There were times I didn't think I'd survive. High highs. Low lows. Everything in between. Drama. Trauma. Llamas. Just kidding, I threw that last one in there to make sure you were paying attention.

So what did I learn from NaNo? Um, I'm crazy. Dos, I really need more time to stew on my characters before I just delve in. I normally do dive right in, but I don't have to get so many words in a certain time frame. I can slow down and speed up as the writing flows. Oh, but not during NaNo. It's a writingapalooza. C) brainstormage is good. Helped me through some rough patches.

I'm happy to report that I didn't use a single song lyric, ten-word name, or cell phone convo between two characters who know everything about each other. Not that I'm better than you if you did. But that's not how I NaNo. I wanted something I could continue to work on after November, something I could edit and revise over the next several months and not hate myself for forgetting that I put "100 bottles of beer" in there just to get the words.

Officially, I wrote 73,788 words during the month of November. Holy lotta words, Batman. I've never written that much in a month. That's like three (okay four) months of writing for me. It really helped that I had five entire days off in a row. I don't think I did anything on Saturday except write. And write. And write. Sometimes that's okay (nice, even), but I need balance in my life. So back to writing on the side.

I'm actually sorta sad it's over (and that shows my psychosis more than anything). Now what am I gonna use to motivate me? My own pathetic self? I don't think so. Good thing I have writerly friends...with goals they'll let me latch on to as if they were my own.