Convention Chronicles in progress: Part I (Tuesday Night)

Oh you say you don’t want it, but I know that you do.  — Jon Stewart

Tuesday, April 26th

Here’s the thing. Writing is what I do to relax. My professional life, the world that pays the bills, is a stress-infested hell. In the months leading up to the RTBOOKClub convention I had been working my ass off on projects that required me to spend several weeks in Little Havana from two in the morning until dawn testing new hardware and the application I had written for it, numerous Friday nights at the office until eleven PM facing an hour and a half drive home and countless other projects that were needed yesterday, if not sooner. I went into the office Tuesday, April 26th to make sure my current work-in-progress ran correctly. My office is in Downtown Miami, Florida. I chose to save $80 on the airfare and flew out of Ft. Lauderdale. Anyone who has driven I-95 in South Florida knows how much it sucks. Last year there were three suicides off the I-595 overpass in Ft. Lauderdale heading to the airport. There’s a reason for that. Being stuck in traffic there is a living death.

I know everyone else was gearing up for this convention planning to meet and greet, shmooze and booze, and generally do whatever they could to move their business along. Writers were hoping for agents, editors or book deals.

Agents were looking for that one gem in a million to push on to the best seller’s lists. Editors were looking for the same and working the booksellers to buy their products. Booksellers were getting the vibe of the writers, publishers and making connections for promotional materials to jazz up the books for their customers. Readers were hoping to get a lot of free books, meet a few of their favorite authors and get a picture of the cover models.

Me? All I wanted was a chance for a quiet dinner with Ann Peach, a raucous drink at the hotel bar with Renee Bernard, a girly chat over toasted ravioli with Judi McCoy and a decent steak, somewhere in cow country.

I am well aware of the fact that my first and possibly only book is due on store shelves in a few short months. I know I should have been planning every possible promotional device open to me at RT. But all I could think about was getting to the hotel room dumping my stuff and finding Renee, Judi or Ann and decompressing.

The plane was packed and it was a three and a half hour flight. Did you know that it’s still cold in St. Louis in the Spring? Yeah? Well someone could have warned me. I waited on the Hotel van outside in the cold dark airport drop-off zone, with my suitcase that weighed 66 pounds (16 pounds over the new official limit, but American gave me a break) freezing my ass off and wondering what kind of people would chose to live in such an Icelandic wasteland.

Convention Chronicles in progress: Part I (Tuesday Night) Cont …

“I don’t have to take you – ya know. You’re not on my list of passengers to pick up. But I’ll make an exception just this once. It costs $15 which is damned cheep compared to what a cab would cost you. You got lucky.”

The Millennium Hotel Van Man had quite the attitude, I must say. If I could have found the cabs, I would have taken one. Screw the cost.


“Jesus, what the hell do you have IN this suitcase? Rocks?” He hefted it into the rear of the van as his other passengers yelled at him to hurry because they were missing the baseball game.


“Among other things.” I said.

I rode up front. I hogged the heater.

“You with them romance writers at the hotel?” He asked, finally deciding to try polite conversation.

“Why do you ask?” It’s always best to be cautious when asked leading questions like this one. There was no telling what my fellow conventioneers had been up to, but I was sure it was an eye-opening experience for anyone who had never seen an RT convention in person before.
 

“Them women can DRINK! There’s something like fourteen hundred of them and they was all at the bar these last two nights.”

“Fourteen hundred? Is there another convention at the hotel besides the romance one?”

“Nope.”

Fourteen hundred? Was that even possible? Past conventions had been around six hundred.

“How do you know it’s fourteen hundred?”

“The check-in clerk said it was. That’s a lot of Romance Writers.”

“They are not all writers. It’s a mix.” I was seriously hoping I wouldn’t spend the rest of the drive defending outré behavior before I’d even had a chance to practice some outré-ness of my own. Damn. Everyone was already there and half the booze would be gone. Fortunately no one else drinks Drambuie. I was probably covered.

Convention Chronicles in progress: Part I (Tuesday Night) Cont …

We arrived at the hotel before he could start asking about the cover models, thank god. I checked in, found Renee and found out that they stopped serving food at ten PM.

I was starving.

Renee discovered that they would deliver room service until eleven. Ha! We were in the bar. She had a hell of a time getting me to leave the bar for the room to get food. In Florida you can’t take your drink with you. In Florida, you can’t smoke in public buildings. In Missouri …? There are no rules – apparently. But. BUT! A decent Florida bar would have served food and had bar snacks. Each place has its charms.


My roommate, Tara Gelsomino wasn’t arriving until the next afternoon. Renee’s roommate Camille Fuller (Cami Dalton) was arriving … we had no idea. Renee and I debated rooming together but never quite managed that arrangement.

“Here it is!” Renee unveiled her next installment of our work-in-progress on her Mac laptop. Yeah. They’re cute little laptops, but completely worthless. Don’t get me started on Macs.

“You want me to read it – now?”

“Why not?” Renee was in full convention-mode. Renee had plans to write, find an agent, get an editor, make contacts and generally do what all writers go to RT to do. I had instant guilt. The burger was excellent, though.

“I have a zip drive!” A plan emerged.

“What’s a zip drive?” Renee was suspicious that I was going to wriggle out of writing stuff. Renee knows me very well.

I showed her. “It’s a little USB drive that we can download the MS to, then I can take it to my laptop. I will work on it later?”

“k.”

The bar, and pretty much everything else in St. Louis, closed at midnight. Coming from Miami, where almost nothing closes – ever -- this is a rather traumatic adjustment. I had plans. My plans suddenly shifted over to require sleep.

Renee reminded me, “We’re getting up at five for the photo shoot with Katherine, right”

“I swear I will get up with you. Call me.”

“I’m calling, but I know you won’t get up.” Renee brought a costume and the local TV station was doing a cute piece on the convention. Carol Stacey and Katherine Faulk had encouraged everyone to show up in costume for it. I do not have a costume. I believe the last costume I purchased was at the Disney Store for my son. Simba. Very cute. I had every intention of getting up and watching the bad craziness unfold though.

“Unless I am dead, I will get up.”

Convention Chronicles in progress: Part II (Wednesday) Cont ...

Wednesday, April 27th

Renee called at 5 am. Sadly, I was dead.

“I am dead.”

“I knew you would be. I’m going!”

“Yawn. K.”

It took me five minutes to get the phone back on the hook thing. I crashed again.

I arose from the dead around eight am, showered, put in contacts and ate in the restaurant in solitary splendor. The service was fabulous. I have to say that this was a great first impression for a restaurant that would later reveal that good service is not it’s primary objective. Still, I had one great meal.

I was expected to serve on a panel for Ann Peach at eleven am. Pam Binder, Kresley Cole, and Karen Robards did not show up for the panel. Renee, Judi and I went into carnival barker mode, pounced some of the Ellora’s Cave authors (Arianna Hart, Cheyenne McCray), and others (Kathy Love, Jewell Mason) in the hallway, and dragged them in for the panel. Ann’s audience got a fabulous talk from writers for whom “The great “What If”” Has no boundaries. Did you ever wonder where they get the ideas for those amazing books? Well. Now we know. At least I know, and so does everyone who attended the session.

For the life of me, lunch that day is a blurr. Ann, Judi, Renee, Cheyenne, Cheyenne’s mom and I all ate at the Hotel Restaurant. The waiter was – I think – Russian. He had a very dry sense of humor and little patience with our antics … so Renee and I stepped up the antics a wee tad. We tip well. He could take it. Judi revealed a deep dark secret that we were not allowed to reveal to her cousin. All of us vowed never to say a word, except Cheyenne’s mom – did I mention Cheyenne’s mom is extremely cool? No? Well. She’s extremely cool.

Someone suggested that we attend Cathy Clamp’s session of Author’s Contracts, so we did. I did not know Cathy Clamp was the same Cathy Clamp who also writes for TOR. She team writes with Cie Adams about a werewolf assassin – GREAT read. Man does she know her stuff about contracts. I learned in spite of myself.

Convention Chronicles in progress: Part II (Wednesday) Cont ...

For dinner Renee and I found ourselves back in the hotel dining room along with L.A. Banks and Camille Fuller. Camille arrived earlier, said she was rooming with Kayla Perin instead of Renee, saw Kayla’s bodyguards and decided to room with Renee.

On the bodyguards: This was the convention of personal security. Kayla had her two G.I Guys who attempted to blend in with the crowd. Guys. … Sigh. Guys. Guys. Guys. Guys. You are two men in Dockers, aviators, Sebagos and handsome at a Romance Writers convention. You had no chance in hell of blending. You, my friends, were as inconspicuous as a giant wedding cake at an overeater’s anonymous meeting. Women everywhere were salivating so hard a river was forming up. If publicity was the goal, Kayla scored in spades. The Editor-in-Chief of Medallion had security, but they must have been ghosts because I never noticed their security guys. Did they bring girls? The last word in pure class is the head of Medallion Press. Laurel K. Hamilton’s security guard somewhat resembled a bouncer at a bar and dressed in biker black. He was intimidating, but I have no idea if he was any kind of real protection as no one – I mean come on, romance readers are not in the best fighting shape – attacked anyone else. We are word people. We use insults if we get feisty. Still we do appreciate the additional eye candy and no one was complaining.

I ordered steak. It was marginal. Camille ate about a third.

We spilled into the Ellora’s Cave party at nine PM and scattered. Ellora’s Cave throws one hell of a party every year. I hung out with my favorite bookseller Cy and her husband and a nice reader Barbara from Wisconsin who had never been to an RT convention before. We got C.J. to sign his picture in the Ellora’s Cave Calendar for us. He’s got to be one of the nicest of the cover models. Rumor has it he’s actually a dentist. I’ve never been able to confirm this … but I think all dentists should look like C.J.. We would visit more often and have better teeth.

At midnight I called it a day. Tara G and I had much gossip to catch up on and girl talk to do. She wouldn’t let me sleep until well after two am.

To be continued ….

 

 

 

 

Text Box: Convention Chronicles in progress: Part I (Tuesday Night) Oh you say you don’t want it, but I know that you do.  — Jon Stewart Tuesday, April 26th Here’s the thing. Writing is what I do to relax. My professional life, the world that pays the bills, is a stress-infested hell. In the months leading up to the RTBOOKClub convention I had been working my ass off on projects that required me to spend several weeks in Little Havana from two in the morning until dawn testing new hardware and the application I had written for it, numerous Friday nights at the office until eleven PM facing an hour and a half drive home and countless other projects that were needed yesterday, if not sooner. I went into the office Tuesday, April 26th to make sure my current work-in-progress ran correctly. My office is in Downtown Miami, Florida. I chose to save $80 on the airfare and flew out of Ft. Lauderdale. Anyone who has driven I-95 in South Florida knows how much it sucks. Last year there were three suicides off the I-595 overpass in Ft. Lauderdale heading to the airport. There’s a reason for that. Being stuck in traffic there is a living death. I know everyone else was gearing up for this convention planning to meet and greet, shmooze and booze, and generally do whatever they could to move their business along. Writers were hoping for agents, editors or book deals. Agents were looking for that one gem in a million to push on to the best seller’s lists. Editors were looking for the same and working the booksellers to buy their products. Booksellers were getting the vibe of the writers, publishers and making connections for promotional materials to jazz up the books for their customers. Readers were hoping to get a lot of free books, meet a few of their favorite authors and get a picture of the cover models. Me? All I wanted was a chance for a quiet dinner with Ann Peach, a raucous drink at the hotel bar with Renee Bernard, a girly chat over toasted ravioli with Judi McCoy and a decent steak, somewhere in cow country. I am well aware of the fact that my first and possibly only book is due on store shelves in a few short months. I know I should have been planning every possible promotional device open to me at RT. But all I could think about was getting to the hotel room dumping my stuff and finding Renee, Judi or Ann and decompressing. The plane was packed and it was a three and a half hour flight. Did you know that it’s still cold in St. Louis in the Spring? Yeah? Well someone could have warned me. I waited on the Hotel van outside in the cold dark airport drop-off zone, with my suitcase that weighed 66 pounds (16 pounds over the new official limit, but American gave me a break) freezing my ass off and wondering what kind of people would chose to live in such an Icelandic wasteland. Convention Chronicles in progress: Part I (Tuesday Night) Cont … “I don’t have to take you – ya know. You’re not on my list of passengers to pick up. But I’ll make an exception just this once. It costs $15 which is damned cheep compared to what a cab would cost you. You got lucky.” The Millennium Hotel Van Man had quite the attitude, I must say. If I could have found the cabs, I would have taken one. Screw the cost. “Jesus, what the hell do you have IN this suitcase? Rocks?” He hefted it into the rear of the van as his other passengers yelled at him to hurry because they were missing the baseball game. “Among other things.” I said. I rode up front. I hogged the heater. “You with them romance writers at the hotel?” He asked, finally deciding to try polite conversation. “Why do you ask?” It’s always best to be cautious when asked leading questions like this one. There was no telling what my fellow conventioneers had been up to, but I was sure it was an eye-opening experience for anyone who had never seen an RT convention in person before. “Them women can DRINK! There’s something like fourteen hundred of them and they was all at the bar these last two nights.” “Fourteen hundred? Is there another convention at the hotel besides the romance one?” “Nope.” Fourteen hundred? Was that even possible? Past conventions had been around six hundred. “How do you know it’s fourteen hundred?” “The check-in clerk said it was. That’s a lot of Romance Writers.” “They are not all writers. It’s a mix.” I was seriously hoping I wouldn’t spend the rest of the drive defending outré behavior before I’d even had a chance to practice some outré-ness of my own. Damn. Everyone was already there and half the booze would be gone. Fortunately no one else drinks Drambuie. I was probably covered. Convention Chronicles in progress: Part I (Tuesday Night) Cont … We arrived at the hotel before he could start asking about the cover models, thank god. I checked in, found Renee and found out that they stopped serving food at ten PM. I was starving. Renee discovered that they would deliver room service until eleven. Ha! We were in the bar. She had a hell of a time getting me to leave the bar for the room to get food. In Florida you can’t take your drink with you. In Florida, you can’t smoke in public buildings. In Missouri …? There are no rules – apparently. But. BUT! A decent Florida bar would have served food and had bar snacks. Each place has its charms. My roommate, Tara Gelsomino wasn’t arriving until the next afternoon. Renee’s roommate Camille Fuller (Cami Dalton) was arriving … we had no idea. Renee and I debated rooming together but never quite managed that arrangement. “Here it is!” Renee unveiled her next installment of our work-in-progress on her Mac laptop. Yeah. They’re cute little laptops, but completely worthless. Don’t get me started on Macs. “You want me to read it – now?” “Why not?” Renee was in full convention-mode. Renee had plans to write, find an agent, get an editor, make contacts and generally do what all writers go to RT to do. I had instant guilt. The burger was excellent, though. “I have a zip drive!” A plan emerged. “What’s a zip drive?” Renee was suspicious that I was going to wriggle out of writing stuff. Renee knows me very well. I showed her. “It’s a little USB drive that we can download the MS to, then I can take it to my laptop. I will work on it later?” “k.” The bar, and pretty much everything else in St. Louis, closed at midnight. Coming from Miami, where almost nothing closes – ever -- this is a rather traumatic adjustment. I had plans. My plans suddenly shifted over to require sleep. Renee reminded me, “We’re getting up at five for the photo shoot with Katherine, right” “I swear I will get up with you. Call me.” “I’m calling, but I know you won’t get up.” Renee brought a costume and the local TV station was doing a cute piece on the convention. Carol Stacey and Katherine Faulk had encouraged everyone to show up in costume for it. I do not have a costume. I believe the last costume I purchased was at the Disney Store for my son. Simba. Very cute. I had every intention of getting up and watching the bad craziness unfold though. “Unless I am dead, I will get up.” Convention Chronicles in progress: Part II (Wednesday) Cont ... Wednesday, April 27th Renee called at 5 am. Sadly, I was dead. “I am dead.” “I knew you would be. I’m going!” “Yawn. K.” It took me five minutes to get the phone back on the hook thing. I crashed again. I arose from the dead around eight am, showered, put in contacts and ate in the restaurant in solitary splendor. The service was fabulous. I have to say that this was a great first impression for a restaurant that would later reveal that good service is not it’s primary objective. Still, I had one great meal. I was expected to serve on a panel for Ann Peach at eleven am. Pam Binder, Kresley Cole, and Karen Robards did not show up for the panel. Renee, Judi and I went into carnival barker mode, pounced some of the Ellora’s Cave authors (Arianna Hart, Cheyenne McCray), and others (Kathy Love, Jewell Mason) in the hallway, and dragged them in for the panel. Ann’s audience got a fabulous talk from writers for whom “The great “What If”” Has no boundaries. Did you ever wonder where they get the ideas for those amazing books? Well. Now we know. At least I know, and so does everyone who attended the session. For the life of me, lunch that day is a blurr. Ann, Judi, Renee, Cheyenne, Cheyenne’s mom and I all ate at the Hotel Restaurant. The waiter was – I think – Russian. He had a very dry sense of humor and little patience with our antics … so Renee and I stepped up the antics a wee tad. We tip well. He could take it. Judi revealed a deep dark secret that we were not allowed to reveal to her cousin. All of us vowed never to say a word, except Cheyenne’s mom – did I mention Cheyenne’s mom is extremely cool? No? Well. She’s extremely cool. Someone suggested that we attend Cathy Clamp’s session of Author’s Contracts, so we did. I did not know Cathy Clamp was the same Cathy Clamp who also writes for TOR. She team writes with Cie Adams about a werewolf assassin – GREAT read. Man does she know her stuff about contracts. I learned in spite of myself. Convention Chronicles in progress: Part II (Wednesday) Cont ... For dinner Renee and I found ourselves back in the hotel dining room along with L.A. Banks and Camille Fuller. Camille arrived earlier, said she was rooming with Kayla Perin instead of Renee, saw Kayla’s bodyguards and decided to room with Renee. On the bodyguards: This was the convention of personal security. Kayla had her two G.I Guys who attempted to blend in with the crowd. Guys. … Sigh. Guys. Guys. Guys. Guys. You are two men in Dockers, aviators, Sebagos and handsome at a Romance Writers convention. You had no chance in hell of blending. You, my friends, were as inconspicuous as a giant wedding cake at an overeater’s anonymous meeting. Women everywhere were salivating so hard a river was forming up. If publicity was the goal, Kayla scored in spades. The Editor-in-Chief of Medallion had security, but they must have been ghosts because I never noticed their security guys. Did they bring girls? The last word in pure class is the head of Medallion Press. Laurel K. Hamilton’s security guard somewhat resembled a bouncer at a bar and dressed in biker black. He was intimidating, but I have no idea if he was any kind of real protection as no one – I mean come on, romance readers are not in the best fighting shape – attacked anyone else. We are word people. We use insults if we get feisty. Still we do appreciate the additional eye candy and no one was complaining. I ordered steak. It was marginal. Camille ate about a third. We spilled into the Ellora’s Cave party at nine PM and scattered. Ellora’s Cave throws one hell of a party every year. I hung out with my favorite bookseller Cy and her husband and a nice reader Barbara from Wisconsin who had never been to an RT convention before. We got C.J. to sign his picture in the Ellora’s Cave Calendar for us. He’s got to be one of the nicest of the cover models. Rumor has it he’s actually a dentist. I’ve never been able to confirm this … but I think all dentists should look like C.J.. We would visit more often and have better teeth. At midnight I called it a day. Tara G and I had much gossip to catch up on and girl talk to do. She wouldn’t let me sleep until well after two am. To be continued ….