The past week has been a hectic one full of new friends, fun activities, great classes and major hustling. The annual LDStorymaker’s conference was held in Provo on Friday and Saturday and it was bigger and better than ever. I can’t remember exact numbers from last year, but it was around 260 attendees. This year it was 453–yes, you read that right, attendance nearly doubled this year (and it had gone up about a hundred last year).
Unfortunately, that meant that I never had a chance to find (never mind talk to) so many of the people I wanted to see, but I met a ton of new people who had never attended a writer’s conference before, or had, at least, never attended this one.

Conferences always invigorate me and have me looking forward to the projects I’ve got lined up ahead of me, and this year was no exception. I spent several days preparing for the trip just getting things settled at home and baking a cake for the Author’s Incognito party Friday night. Which is pictured at the top of this post.

Turned out pretty cute, didn’t it? I’d never done wood grain before, but it was easier than I expected. The entire thing is edible and all the decorations are made of fondant. The silver pearl dust was purchased here (and comes in lots of fun colors). I did this design because Cake Central is doing a Steam Punk cake contest this month and I wanted to try something that would at least marginally qualify. You can read the full set of directions here on my new cake blog.

At the conference we also got to see the finished music video that I spent a day filming last month. I was amazed, we seriously were there almost all day, yet the parts I was there for only took up about thirty seconds of the actual four-and-a-half-minute video. It was all in good fun though. I can’t wait to see what they come up with for next year. They are doing a lyric contest for next year’s video, so if you are a dab hand at writing lyrics (to something reasonably recent, and available on a Karaoke CD so they can dub different words to the music) you should totally submit something. I’m already mulling around some ideas. You can see this year’s video below: