Writer's Weekend--Day 3 (continued)

[annathepiper]

Now that I am beginning to get some coherence back following my surgery, it is time to record the rest of what happened at Writer's Weekend before it fades from my memory entirely! Stupid life distractions, keeping me from updating my Livejournal.

At any rate, rewind back a couple of weekends, to Saturday the 24th. When last we left our heroine, she had attended Anna Genoese's panel on Presenting Yourself. And now...

During much of this afternoon, agents and editors were working their way through appointments with authors. I wound up not bothering to make an appointment since, as I think I've mentioned before on earlier posts, a great deal of my purpose at this event was to absorb information.

But I wound up skipping the panels scheduled at the same time, in favor of continuing my editing marathon with Faerie Blood. And that's pretty much what I did until it was time for the booksigning!


The one part of this event open to the public was the two-hour book sale and signing, where copies of many of the works written by the guests were to be sold and signed by the same guests. We saw at least a few folks come in off the street with armfuls of books, to join those of us at the conference; I remember seeing a couple of folks with Jacqueline Carey's entire trilogy.

I have to admit that I jumped the gun once and tried to enter the room before it was fully set up, but hey, the allure of shiny new books was a powerful pull--for others as well as me! shadowhwk had to shoo a couple other folks out besides me, before the signing finally opened up.

I wound up buying all three of Rebecca York's novels (which I have since read, and about which I have since posted), and the first of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel books. And I intended to get just one of Ms. York's books signed, so I asked her which one was her favorite; she told me the first, which is Killing Moon, but she also signed all three books. I was also amused to see her playing with a sparkly wand like the one which is an important plot point in Edge of the Moon.

Then I stepped over to have Jacqueline Carey sign Kushiel's Dart for me, and told her as I did that I expected her book to be a challenging read for me because of the subject matter... and that I appreciated a book that could challenge me. I hope that she thought this was a good thing!

If I had thought ahead I would have brought my copies of the Dresden Files books so that I could have gotten Jim Butcher to sign something too--but sadly, that had not occurred to me. Doh! Maybe next year, as the Butchers did say that they'd be attending next year's conference.

Anyway, with four brand new autographed books in my possession, I scampered on out of the signing quite happily indeed.


The last big events of the evening were the Flowers of the Night Court Masque Supper, the Basket Raffle, and the Writing Contest Awards presentation, all of which were held in the same room we'd been having all the programming in up till that point, and all of which were basically lined up one after the other in one combined evening event.

A whole lot of the guests dressed up for the Masque. I was not one of them, which is what I get for being costuming-impaired. It must be said that jesshartley did kindly offer to loan me a gown to try on, though we lost track of one another through the course of the afternoon, so she wound up loaning the gown to mizkit instead.

But it was all good. I briefly considered skipping the whole shebang and holing myself up with the ongoing editing work; ultimately, though, I opted to join in on the fun. If nothing else, the whole conference was supposed to be about networking--so for all that I tend to be a raging introvert, I decided it was best that I actually make myself like, y'know, network.

So network I did, though I had only the freebie plastic beads and the feather mask that came with the bag of goodies handed out to all the conference-goers to show for finery. Comfortingly, though, I was not the only one in such straits. A young lady by the name of Betsy, who was a former philosophy major who'd escaped from the realm of academia when the attitudes of some in her chosen field of study began to disillusion her, happily struck up a conversation with me as she saw me clad in everyday clothing. We decided to hang out during dinner, and I gave her two of my four bead necklaces since she didn't even have any of those. Grinningly, since the event in general had this whole "court of the fey" theme going on, we decided we were clearly either the peasants of the fey, or at least the local Unseelie. ;)

Unlike the previous meals that had been served thus far, this one was a sit-down banquet with place settings, candles, and flower petals and bits of shining faux crystals scattered all over the tablecloths. It was all very nicely done and very fancy in a free-spirited and casual kind of way.

Betsy and I claimed one of the tables along the back wall, at which we were soon joined by chrysoula... and Helen Brown of the Evan Fogelman Literary Agency, who we cheerily welcomed to the 'Unseelie Court' table. She was a soft-spoken, well-mannered woman, and it was a pleasure to see how she hit it off with Betsy, to whom she did most of her talking as it turned out they were both--or so I understood it--from the same section of Rhode Island. Mostly we chatted about stuff outside the realm of writing, but we all did ask Ms. Brown things like what had interested her about her profession, what sort of work she liked to handle, that kind of thing. She also spoke highly of her boss--and we got a glimpse of the truth of her praise as we saw Mr. Fogelman going around serving wine to everyone, which was quite nice of him.

The dinner itself was... well, damned if I can remember the specific meal we ate, past liking it. This is what I get for having delayed this long in making this post! But I do remember the dessert that was served: a vegan chcocolate cake that was surprisingly not half bad, and a light champagne that went with it extremely well. It was the sort of rich cake that you had to take your time eating, lest it overwhelm the taste buds. And not quite what you expect if you are accustomed to non-vegan cake--something about the texture and consistency of the cake was different, but not bad. It wasn't as fluffy as you might expect from a non-vegan cake, and denser.

As we were working on dinner it swung around to be time for the Basket Raffle. Up until this point there had already been several smaller raffles in between the various panels, in which the winners received baskets of goodies such as journals or paperbacks or bath stuff. Now, they raffled off the rest of the goodies.

And I wound up getting the "Paranormal Basket". This amused me just because there was very little paranormal involved with this basket--rather, I got a set of pens, a set of bath things (bath beads, lotion, body wash, and a bath sponge, all of which were in shades of sea blue), a journal, a little memo pad and a set of notecards, and a bunch of books, very few of which were actually paranormal in nature. Instead, there were mostly historical romances. ;) And oh yes, and most importantly, there was CHOCOLATE. The ladies who put these baskets together definitely understood their expected recipients!

The basket the loot came in was actually a hat-type box, circular with a lid and a cord by which to carry it. I think that its original purpose still must have been a gift box of some sort, though, since the box matched the journal and the smaller box that held the memo pad and notecards. All in all, a nice collection of goodies to score!

All throughout the raffle, the table where Kit and her husband Ted, Jim and Sharon Butcher, and others were sitting kept making the rest of us snicker by cheering or going "aw" with each digit of the numbers read out by Sarah on the winning tickets. The extra funny came in here with the first three digits on all the tickets being the same--666. Sarah had it pointed out to her that she did not have to read off the first three digits since they were in fact all the same. Sarah read them anyway, just because it was funny.

After that, it was time for the Writing Contest awards. Some extra special goodness came in here as well, as it was announced that the conference's youngest guest--the 13-year-old kid--had gotten Anna Genoese to ask him to submit his entire manuscript to her. Every single adult in the room applauded loud and long for that, and we should have--because that was QUITE an achievement for a kid!

Aside from that, it was pretty cool to see the award recipients take their prizes, though many recipients were in fact not in attendance, having had to skip out for one reason or another. But those who were present got to have their pictures taken and such, and they got little plaques to commemorate their win, small cash prizes, and loot similar to what got handed out during the raffle.

And finally, it was time for the chocolate and champagne social. But by then I was kind of socialed out--so I retreated to my room, spent some time alternating between editing Faerie Blood and reading the opening chapters of Killing Moon, and at last went to bed