thursday:

Thursday. For real this time. :)

So I finished my book while I was waiting for the limo, and then Kathy and Kristie and their husbands Jim and Ron arrived and we all piled into the v. comfy limo that Karen had sent to pick them up (I lucked out, or something like that, because my plane was late) and we went to the Junker’s house.

By the time we arrived, we’d *already* missed the Pasties Incident, and this was only Thursday night, so this should suggest to you what kind of weekend it was going to be.

Russell Davis of Five Star and Anna Genoese of Tor Books were already there, along with Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon and about twenty zillion other people, including Julie of the Pasties Incident, Terey, Whose Fault It Was, Cyn, Whose Room I Got, Dave Who Is BangBang, Margie Whom I Met At RMFW Last Year, and many, many others.

Let us get the Pasties Incident out of the way here at the beginning, although heaven knows why we should, as it followed us, or at least Julie, through the whole weekend, and I wasn’t even there for it!

Apparently someone (it may have been Julie but it also might’ve been Terey, Whose Fault It Was) put Julie’s name tag directly over her breast (over her shirt, mind you). This prompted an observation that she was lopsided, so they put another name tag over her other breast. Then that didn’t seem like enough, so they appropriated some of the tiny pinwheels that were being handed out for, and … you can see where this is going.

Julie, thus bedecked, walked out into the back yard, where Russell Davis took one look at her, stood up, offered his hand, and said, “I’m Russell Davis, and I don’t care *what* you write.”

Julie, later bemoaning that the Pasties Incident was the end of her writing career, had Russell say, “Oh no, it was the *beginning* of your writing career.” *beam* (It is, of course, going to follow her for the rest of her life, in part thanks to people like me, who will cheerfully re-tell the tale, but hey! Them’s the breaks!)

Before I heard about the Pasties Incident, I met Karen, who is a wonderful woman, and who said, “There’s someone you know here!” And indeed, Margie from the RMFW who had also finaled in last year’s RMFW contest, was there, so we caught up, and that was great!

I met a nice guy named Dave Gross who works for Paizo Publishing, and we talked for a while, and then I overheard Russell and Julie and some others talking about Laurell Hamilton, so I went over and barged into that conversation, which turned out to actually be about how it’s good for authors to break out and write more than one series because it keeps their writing fresher. It eventually devolved into this discussion about how we were quite sure there was probably just one single little old man sitting in a room somewhere, controlling the entire publishing industry, and the little old man came back to haunt us several times during the weekend, as well. :)

I popped over to the hotel at some point during the evening to check in. They gave me a key, I went up to the room, and the key didn’t work. I went back to the office and said, “This key doesn’t work!” So they re-keyed it. I went back to the room, opened the door — and there was stuff in it already! I went, “Ack!” and went BACK to the office (meanwhile, the poor limo driver was waiting for me) and discovered that while I was booked for Thursday night, I wasn’t booked for Friday or Saturday night. So after that all got straightened out, I got a new key for a new room and went and got my stuff and stuck it in the new room and went back to the Junker’s and stayed until, hm. 10ish, I think. It got dark. Very weird.