On with the motley!
Now for the convention. The hotel, the Marriott on Canal Street, was nice and central, the rooms clean and big enough. A good convention hotel. It would have been nice if the lobby was more spacious, but this is an older hotel in a central location. The ballrooms and other rooms were fine.
This is most decidedly my convention, not anyone else’s. One thing I’ve learned from RT is that everybody is different, and everybody’s convention is different.
I started my convention with the International meeting. That was a delight, and held in the glorious Riverside Room at the top of the Marriott, with magnificent views. The attendees came from all over the world – from Thailand, Brazil, and Russia as well as from Europe, Australia, and Canada. We had a gift exchange, where everybody brought a gift from their country and took one from another, a gesture of friendship that I found delightful. Aussie friend Megan Bamford was my co-organizer, and we were really pleased with the welcome we could offer our colleagues from overseas and over the border!
At the Welcome Party, I was given a tiny spot with Megan and we took the biggest selfie we could manage, which we Facebooked and tweeted. Then Megan got a huge shock when she won the Bookseller of the Year Award. Well deserved, and since I was sitting next to her I was able to give her a big hug and lend her a tissue to mop up her tears!
I had two panels to give. History Fan Fictionary is a popular reader panel, where the panellists give different definitions for the same word. There are prizes for the people who guess right, but when the words are things like “fubsy,” the readers had to work for their prizes! My other panel was one I captained, on the vanilla erotic ie non-BDSM. What else can you write about with erotic romance? Well, there’s kink, ménage, and tons of other things. Plus, Desiree Holt and her world-famous Barbie dolls! We’re asking to do it again next year.
For the rest – I’ll cover the booksigning in another post. But the first night was the Mardi Gras ball. I was glad I’d thought to shove a cover-up in my bag because I needed it! New Orleans might be hot during the day, but it can sure cool down at night! We had a fabulous zydeco band playing for us, and it was awesome to see the actual floats.
I had fun at the parties and danced my little heart out. I met with friends and loved talking with them. I told fortunes at the Pub Crawl in the Kensington pub, Pat O’Brien’s and the cards behaved themselves for me. You can never tell, but it wouldn’t have been good if they’d decided to be confusing! I brought two packs of cards, just in case, but the Rider pack stayed in my bag and the Egyptian Tarot worked fine.
I also signed for the first time as a Kensington author. That was a thrill in itself, and Desiree and I both needed extra copies of the excerpt booklet to sign. My book isn’t out until August, but Kensington did a great job with the booklets. There were some wonderful snow globes with our book covers on them!
As usual the time whizzed by, and RT was over as fast as it had begun. Considering this was the biggest convention ever, it went remarkably smoothly and everyone had a good time. By the last night at the Harlequin party, my voice had almost gone and I was partied out!
