The local ACFW chapter I started--IDAhope Writers--had the last meeting of our first year this week.  It was our best meeting yet.  I'm so blessed to be a part of such a neat group.  Let me share the reasons why.

1. Adam Graham announced that he had part of his political blog published in Mike Huckabee's book, Do The Right Thing.  His name is even listed in the bibliography.  This book is ranked as a best seller on Amazon.  How cool is that?

2. We had a visitor, Vlad, who moved here from Russia.  He had three books printed in Russia and is hoping to translate them to English and sell them here.  They have international settings, and one was even a bestseller.  The cool part?  The people who made Pirates of the Caribbean were talking to him about making a movie out of one of his books.

3. There is also a guy in our group who writes a hunting/fishing column for a variety of newspapers in the Northwest.  He suggested that I write a column for young moms, and he'll have one of his friends translate it into Spanish.  He believes there is a big need for it in our area, and he wants to help me pitch it to his editor.  This isn't a dream of mine the way writing fiction is, but it's an open door.  And not only was I a young mom, but I started a MOPS for teenagers here in Boise.  I'll have to get to work on some sample columns this weekend.

4. My Vice President and Treasurer gave me flowers.  I gave them cute little Christmas ornaments that read: Always Have Hope.

5. We played a game where we divided up into two teams.  Each team had to pick five books and write new first lines for each of them.  Then the teams took turns reading both the original line and the rewritten line.  The other team had to pick which line they thought was the real one.  The game ended in a tie, but we decided that everybody in our group can write better first lines than the authors of the books we used.

6. We had a tie breaker to our game and the winning team each got $5 off registration for our conference in January.

7. It looks like I'll be president for another year, which is a really good thing because I need to make up for all the clueless mistakes I made this year.  Anyway, we've decided that we will have ten meetings next year--one a month from Feb.-Nov.  Every other month we will have a guest speaker, and in between speakers we will meet for a critique group.

I'm really looking forward to another year of IDAhope.