Thursday-Saturday writeup behind the tag.
I should be, I don’t know. Taking a nap, or something. It turns out the hotel doesn’t have net access unless you provide your own ethernet card, which I didn’t, so no actual updates, oops. O Vell. Not that there’s been a whole hell of a lot of time to log on. Maybe I’ll try grabbing one of the terminals at the airport tomorrow for a few minutes, or something. If there are any at the Denver airport. Anyway.
It’s Saturday afternoon right now and there’s stuff going on, but it’s only of moderate interest to me and I thought I’d escape to the room for a while. Now that I’m here away from all the noise and stimulation I’m like zzzzSNXNKKXTzzzzzz.
I have had a very, very fine time thus far. Thursday night I went out to dinner with Robin Owens and Christie Golden, which was just tremendous fun. We believe it’s the most Luna authors in one place thus far. :) They’re both tiny, petite people, and there I was at 5’8″ just TOWERING over them, and of course I’d only seen one picture of Christie and her hair was long and mostly straight, and now it’s short and quite curly, and she had no idea at all what I looked like, and had I not seen Margie Lawson and gone over to talk to her so that when Robin showed up not long after that, heaven knows if we’d have ever managed to actually hook up. Well, we would have, because Christie and Robin know each other, and I figured I’d just wait til two short women hugged in the lobby and I’d go introduce myself to them. :)
We talked books and movies and books and some more books, and writing and books and covers–Christie showed us the cover for IN STONE’S CLASP, which is the second of her Final Dance series, and it’s goooooorgeous. Robin gave me a cover flat for her book, GUARDIAN OF HONOR, which is due out in February, and it’d wonderfully elegant and restrained and goooorgous, and they’re probably going to redo it entirely. Hnf. :) So we hung out for about three hours and just talked and talked, and, oh! Christie brought me a copy of her book INSTRUMENT OF FATE, which I had not previously owned, and I got her to sign both it and KING’S MAN AND THIEF, which book of hers I utterly adore. And Robin brought me a pewter crescent moon pin, ’cause we’re Luna authors! And, oh, I wore the arrowhead necklace that Misty made me, and when the topic got around to her and how generous she’s been with her necklaces and support of the other Luna authors, I said it was the one Misty’d made me and Christie said she’d been admiring it all night, which I thought was pretty cool. :) It was really, really fun!
Friday morning I did the one good-for-myself thing that I’ve done all weekend, and went down to the gym to walk a mile on the treadmill. Bah. Treadmills. I hate ’em. You don’t go anywhere. Then, since I was, y’know, there and stuff, I went up to the registration area and volunteered to make myself useful, and spent the next couple hours helping out with registration bag-stuffing and the like, and talking to people and meeting people, and then yay! I discovered that Margie Rowland, whom I met at RMFW in 2002, and who was at the 2003 Writer’s Weekend, was also at RMFW 2004! So we’ve hung out a fair bit and generally enjoyed catching up, which is very cool.
The panels and talks have not been as revolutionary to me as they were two years ago, but I’ve had a bloody magnificent time talking with people and some of the stuff has been very, very interesting. My absolute favorite so far was the talk called, “He said, She Thinks,” which was about the differences in how men and women communicate. The one that I really loved was this:
For women, the word “fine” means the conversation is over. For men, the word “fine” means “all right” or “nice”. So when a man says to a woman, “You look fine,” what the woman hears is, “For God’s sake, stop asking, this conversation has been shut down,” while what he’s really saying is, “You look nice.”
Men, remember this, because it is absolutely true.
I have socialized a huge amount. Every time somebody asks Robin about Luna, she says, “You should talk to Catie!” So people *keep* coming up to me and asking about Luna, often when Robin is nearby, and I discovered this afternoon that she was in fact telling people to talk to me. *laugh* So I’ve talked about Luna a lot, and handed out a number of business cards (I got them! Everybody laughs when they read “C.E. Murphy, famous writer”, which is exactly what they should do! *beam*), and talked about my first sale and generally lauded RMFW for providing me the kick in the pants that I needed, and I have had an absolutely bloody terrific time.
Last night there was an after-hours party in the hospitality suite, with 50 or 60 people crowded in there, and I talked to all sorts of people. Writers and agents and photographers and everybody! It was a great deal of fun, I got a lot of congratulations on selling URBAN SHAMAN and the anthology sale (Christie, on Thursday, congratulated me in person about the anthology, and said, “I’m jealous. I have *no time*, but I’m jealous,” which struck me as, I don’t know, a very nice thing for her to say, in a way. I mean, the anthology is a Huge Deal, so huge that *I’m* practically jealous, and hell, it’s me! It was just peculiarly reassuring to hear it actually said out loud. Perhaps I’m very weird.), and let me tell you, this little yellow ‘author’ ribbon I get to wear on my nametag makes all kinds of people come up to talk to me. It’s very cool!
By last night my back was very, very achy and I was completely exhausted. I managed to activate the chemical ice pack I’d brought with me (after a huge amount of squishing it around trying to break the inner bag to make it work) and that helped, so I was glad I’d brought those. Today I’m wearing my walking shoes instead of my clogs, which is better for me. Also, there’s been less standing around, which doesn’t hurt. Er. Literally, I guess. o.O
There’s a panel in 10 minutes called “10 Questions You Were Afraid To Ask” and I’m trying to decide if I want to go to find out what those questions are, or if I want to take a nap. SO sleepy, at this point. And tonight, I suspect, shall run late too.
But, hey, guess what. I wrote 4000 words on Thursday. If I can do that again on the plane flight home, hell, the trip will be worth it just in wordcount! Not that it hasn’t been worth it in other aspects; I’m having a blast.
Okay. Off to the panel, ’cause that’ll probably wake me up again.