My Red-Letter Day: Meeting Singer, Speaker, and Author LaDonna Gatlin

I had the most fun experience this week: I met LaDonna Gatlin, an author with whom I’ve been working since I first read her book proposal for The Song in You: Finding Your Voice, Redefining Your Life in the summer of 2011. If you had spent as much time on the telephone as LaDonna and I spent over the past eighteen months, you get to be pretty good friends . . . so when my friend LaDonna told me she would be the special guest speaker at a Women in Red tea sponsored by the Munroe Regional Medical Center in Ocala, Florida, sparks flew off the computer keyboard as I typed the address into Google Maps. Who cares that Ocala is a four-hour drive each direction? I was going to meet my author! (That’s how I get to feel about nearly every author I work with; it’s pretty easy to do when both of you love words and have the same goal of making a book the best it can be.

LaDonna Gatlin is one of the most amazingly warm and generous people you’ll ever have the privilege of meeting. Yes, she’s a professional speaker and singer (learn more about that here), but she is as down-to-earth as anyone I’ve ever met. That southern charm isn’t just for show: after an hour on stage singing and motivating the heck out of 250 women (who were all dressed in red), LaDonna spent another hour signing copies of her book and CD (both titled The Song in You) for the lucky door-prize winners. She also sat for countless photos with anyone who asked—like me!

After LaDonna generously introduced me to the crowd as her book editor, several of the attendees asked me if she is really as nice as she seems on stage. I assured them that she really is. They were amazed to find out that LaDonna and I had never met in person until that day, and all agreed that they, too, would have made the drive for such a wonderful opportunity.

So thank again to Munroe Regional’s Women in Red Program for your hospitality and for the chance to meet one of my favorite authors! (Here are several audio clips from LaDonna’s albums so you can enjoy her, too: http://ladonnagatlin.com/index.php/clip/audio-clips/).

You can see LaDonna on Monday, March 11, when she’ll be a guest on Marie Osmond’s show on the Hallmark Channel. These two women have a lot in common, including famous brothers and showbiz childhoods, so mark it on your calendar.

—Candace

Related posts:

The Song in You (https://changeitupediting.com)

Testimonials (https://changeitupediting.com)