Hi all!

I’m back from RWA safe and sound, though I still feel like I’m in recovery mode. I didn’t forget about the contest (never fear!) but I’m going to need the weekend to finish catching up and mentally processing everything.

 

RWA was awesome, as usual. I missed all of the PAN track, almost all of the panels, but I had some really great meetings, caught up with friends, and basically handed a bookmark to anyone that was even remotely interested. The consensus? My covers are smoking hot, and the hero on the second cover might or might not have a baseball in his pants. I’m just saying.

 

I actually got to fly home first class, too! That was a first for me. When I went to check in with the airline, a message popped up on the screen. “Would you like to upgrade to first class for $135?”  This is like asking, “Would you like a free cookie with your frappucino?” or “Would you like a two-book contract instead of just one?” Total no brainer. Naturally, I said yes! So I got into my fancy first-class seat and…what a difference! Leg room galore, a blanket to keep me warm, and a nice little table separating me from my seatmate. There were even earphones, a TV, and breakfast. Unfortunately, I missed all of that since I totally passed out and fell asleep before the plane had even left the dock.

 

As soon as I got home…copyedits on book two were waiting for me! So I finished those…and went back to work, where my boss said “Oh good! You’re back! Here’s three projects!”

 

Story of my life. J So I’ve been a bit swamped. But! I am trying to dig my way out. I’m planning on a few more zombie fairy tales within the next month, and as long as I have publisher permission, I’m going to serialize the dinosaurs-conquistadors-Bermuda-Triangle romance. I’m thinking one chapter a week until it’s done, but we’ll see how much editing it needs.

 

So that’s the not so exciting, tl;dr update of my life. I’ll be back on Monday or so with the contest. Trying to decide if I want to give away signed books that I snagged at RWA or an Amazon gift certificate. Thoughts?

Mirrored from Jill Myles Dot Com.

I will be at RWA this week. I’m not taking a laptop, so I won’t be blogging, but I will be Twittering and occasionally posting pictures when I remember.

Also! I have these:

Rack cards and bookmarks! So if you want to look at my cover art, be sure and check the Goody Room, or flag me down (I plan on carrying plenty.

Also, if you get a bookmark or rack card, SAVE IT. I’m going to hold a contest when I get back, and you will need to answer the following question: How many man-nipples are on the bookmark/rack card? Fabulous prizes await.

Have fun this week!

Mirrored from Jill Myles Dot Com.

Granted!

(At least to myself)

After I finish my novella (which has picked up, much to my delight), I am giving myself permission to go back to the Crackhead Project. Because I read through it last night and I still want to work on it (and love it and hug it and possibly call it George).

It’s amazing how freeing it feels to give myself permission to work on blow-off projects. Well, that, and working on a project every day exponentially increases the love you have for it.

I’m expecting my promo bookmarks in any day now. They’re arriving just in time for RWA, and I will be carting them around by the handful while at conference.

If you want to see my terrific cover art, this is the ONLY way to do it (at least for a few weeks). So if you want a bookmark, just ask me! And keep it at hand for after RWA, because I intend to have a contest where you can win something impressive. Like lots of free books, or a gift certificate, or maybe even an ipod.

Mirrored from Jill Myles Dot Com.

So I posted this on Absolute Write but I thought I'd post it here as well, since a lot of folks that read my journal are also on the lookout for agents.

I went to the Dallas Area Romance Authors mini-convention this weekend and they had a couple of agent panels. I went to both. I don’t need an agent, but I wanted to hear what they had to say and pass it along.

 

 

( Barbara Poelle, Holly Root and Emmanuelle Alspaugh at the DARA Convention... )
I think that covers everything. I'm going by memory so if I missed something, I apologize!

…what do you write about?

I started this journal because I wanted to keep myself honest about the writing. And for a while there, when I was writing every day, I was journaling every day with metrics and snippets and details and life was great. I haven’t done metrics a lot lately, mostly because they’d read like this:

Monday: 0
Tuesday: 0
Wednesday: 0
Thursday: Does paying my bills online count?
Friday: 0

You see the drill. No darlings, no snippets, only the occasional emo angsting on Twitter. I haven’t been going out and doing exciting stuff, I’ve just been sleeping and working, sleeping and working. Occasionally winding down with some X-box 360. Very little reading. Little to no writing.

I’m in the nebulous ‘between’ stage again, and we hates it, preciousss. For a variety of reasons, I’m holding off on new projects and am working on completing an old one that’s about 75% done. You know how it is with old projects. They’re like leftovers. They loiter in the back of your fridge like the virtuous, stockpiled-for-later things that they are, and you tell yourself “I’m going to eat that tomorrow!” Except when tomorrow gets here and all you have staring back at you is leftovers, you opt for pizza delivery (or the new manuscript) instead.

I *KNOW*. I do this with manuscripts all the time. “I’ll come back to this one later! No problem!”

Except it IS a problem when it turns into leftovers. Still, I am being virtuous and slowly working my way through it, even if it is by small spoonfuls. I’m hoping April provides a little more excitement and guidance, but I think it’s going to be a slow burn until the beginning of summer. We’ll see. In the meantime, I am debating what to do with said story when I am done with it, since it looks like it will only be about 55k or so, max. And kind of nerdy. Romantic, but nerdy.

But who cares about all that, right? Did you see that Meljean Brook’s awesome novella, “Thicker Than Blood” in the FIRST BLOOD anthology has been nominated for a RITA Award? The only paranormal novella – I’m so excited for her and I hope she wins! I absolutely loved this story.

Also nominated? Roxanne St. Claire’s excellent NOW YOU DIE and Nalini Singh’s MINE TO POSSESS.

Congrats to all the RITA nominations.

Mirrored from Jill Myles Dot Com.

On Saturday, I completely slept through my alarm, and woke up very shortly before I wanted to be at the Pocket signing. I had met so many wonderful people at the Pocket Dinner on Thursday night that I simply had to show up and get signed copies of free books.

( Here we go! )


And that's all the conference photos I have! I sort of forgot to keep taking them as the afternoon progressed. I think there were a few others with me in them that I'll link back to as they pop up.

All in all, it was fun, so very very fun. I'm kinda sad that the next one is a full year away.

I'm running out of steam on the RWA blogging, so I'll at least post all my pictures, right? Right.

( Behind the cut once more...long, picture intense, and kinda fangirly. )

...

Isn't that the SADDEST Conference photo ever? A damn salad? I swear there was a point to it, though. I was going to take all kinds of pictures of the wackiness and sheer fun of the Harlequin party, and I was going to start with the decorations and hors d'ouvres because they looked so neat. Unfortunately after one pathetic picture of a salad, my camera was full.

CURSES!

So yeah. All you get is a measley shot of a salad. We hung out at the Harlequin party for a while, and then on the balcony when it got too noisy to talk and we wanted to talk shop. We left early and all went to a late night Batman showing with several other friends. It was really great and I enjoyed the movie...but I kept nodding off at the important parts, which made me sad. I still don't know what happened to the joker.


Next up, Saturday photos (which, oddly enough, do not involve Rita photos. I R Bad Photographer.)

Fair warning: I spent half of the RWA Literacy Signing taking pictures for Jane (which you can see on Blog Nationals) and the other half of the time squealing and spitting out erudite phrases such as "Omg I love your books!"

( Clicky clicky for author pictures )


More pictures later!

Still more to blog about, but here's some photos for some of what I've blogged about so far:


( General Conference stuff...for starters! )



All terribly exciting stuff, I know. Next post will be literacy signing pics!

I forgot to mention the Literacy Signing on Wednesday night. Utter madness. 500+ authors, thousands of people crammed into one room. It was crazy. I went in saying I wasn't going to buy anything...and then I bought stuff anyhow. Marjorie Liu was my first hit-up. I confess that I was so intimidated by her utter delicate prettiness that it was hard to converse. In fact, half the conference, the only things out of my mouth were stuff like "Hi, I love all your books!" Total fangirl? Me.

Thursday...let me see, what did I do on Thursday?

Ah yes! I went to breakfast with Michelle Rowen, Michele Lang, and Caitlin Kittredge. Charlene Teglia was supposed to meet us, but we didn't see her the whole conference (what gives, Charli?). Anyhow, we were all amazed at the sheer pricey-ness of the Garden Terrace restaurant. The buffet? $22. Crazytimes, but they had nice stuff on there. We chatted about PAN and some other junk I can't remember. Michele Lang is smiley and sweet and so cute. I loved her. Michelle Rowen is like my soul-sister or something. She's hilarious and as witty as I want to be. I think Caitlin surprised me a little (and I have no idea why) because she is very tall, supermodel skinny (you should have seen her legs in her jeans. bitch!) and has the sweetest voice. It was so much fun to catch up to everyone and put faces to the names.

After breakfast I hung out with Caitlin a little more, and then went to the Keynote Luncheon. I tried to find Michelle Rowen's gang again but by the time we were able to text each other, I was already sitting with a bunch of lovely people and I would have felt like a total arse leaving them. At my table were some aspiring authors, a Cerridwen author whose name escapes me (so sorry! eek!), a Harlequin author (same! I stink with names!) and Jenna Petersen, Avon author and owner of The Passionate Pen website. Jenna was so sweet and lovely I vowed to score copies of her books. At the luncheon, it was a lovely 3-course meal of some sort of foofoo spinach salad, the dreaded conference chicken, and some sort of tart/cake thing. I thought it was cool that when we sat down, there were Victoria Alexander books waiting for us, and a scented spray. Victoria Alexander was the keynote speaker, and she was SO very funny. I loved her speech.

I was too lazy to join PAN or PRO so I didn't go to the retreat. Instead, the afternoon consisted of me wandering into the occasional workshop, finding it to be standing-room only, and then wandering back out again.

Oh! And I met up with my editor! Micki was totally lovely, and I swear she could give anyone in The Devil Wears Prada a run for their money, fashion-wise. She looked very gorgeous and New York and I just loved her. We talked about my books, pub dates, and plans for marketing, and some of the other stuff she's acquired.

My new pub date? January 2010. Write that down.

The bad news? It's 2010. The good news? January is a great month. So I'm very happy with that, and I'll be updating websites and such with the correct info later.


Later that night, there was the Pocket Dinner. I confess I didn't know what to expect, but I dressed up all fancy, and then ruined it with a jacket because San Fran is COLD. The Pocket dinner was at a place called Paragon, and they reserved the entire restaurant for us. We had name-badges that were the book-covers for each author. I didn't have a cover, so I had 'Gertrude', the S&S mascot kangaroo. We networked the heck out of dinner, and I met SO many other Pocket authors and they were all so awesome! If you've never met Rocki (Roxanne) St. Claire, you totally should. So warm, and nice and genuine. Sophie Jordan aka Sharie Kohler was there, and she's beautiful and was so pleasant.

(In case you are wondering, yes, I had a girl crush on half the conference at this point)

I also met, let's see. Oh! Meredith Duran, who won the Gather.com contest and was published by Pocket. Meredith was awesome! I read her book on the plane-ride home too, and it was equally awesome! We had assigned seating for dinner and I sat with Thea Devine, Melissa Mayhue, Gwyn Cready, and editor Megan McKeever (who was lovely and sweet). There was wine aplenty, tons of discussion about book covers and what really moves a book, and I felt like I learned so much.

By the time the Pocket dinner was over, I was pretty soused on wine and amaretto, and it was late-ish, so I went back and crashed. I'm sure I have some pictures of a few things from Thursday (alas, not the dinner) that I'll post later tonight.

We're about to head off to Home Depot at butt-crack in the morning and I feel wrecked, but I do want to chat a bit about my conference experience.

I arrived at the Marriott after getting lost on the BART (which is not a shuttle directly from airport to hotel, damn you Orbitz) and then wandering the streets of downtown. After asking several (several several) people "Where is the Marriott???", I decided to get a cab. I get to the first one and say "Do you know where the Marriott is?"

He gave me a weird look and pointed at the building I was standing in front of. Oops. Yes, I am that good of a traveller.

The hotel itself was always packed to the brim with people...or rather, I should say, WOMEN. Women everywhere, having drinks, waiting for friends, chatting. Very intimidating when you first get in. I spotted Christine Feehan out in the wild, Julia Quinn, and a few other people, but didn't bother them since they were sitting with pals. Checked in, looked in vain for my roommate, and then decided to wander around and see what I could get into.

First stop? Goody room. I'm not sure how 'goody' it was considering I was expecting AMAZING AMAZING stuff in there. I did find it to be a really interesting collection of promo items. Postcards, bookmarks, magnets, pins, calendars, pens, you name it. I picked up a bunch of cover flats and some of the more creative goodies.

After wandering the convention for a good hour or so, I finally find Jane, my roomie. For those of you who don't know, Jane runs the Dear Author website and happens to be insanely beautiful and elegant. Bitch. ;) We meet up, and then over the course of several hours, I meet tons of people and no longer feel like a little lost lamb.

Heather Osborn at Tor is the funniest person evah. Srsly. I am still cracking up over some stuff she's said. Kresley Cole? I totally have a girlcrush on her. Smart, skinny, beautiful, lively, and does a mean Swedish chef imitation. ;) I also ran into Kassia Kroszer, Gena Showalter, and Jill Monroe. If you think Gena is pretty in her photos, meet her in person. You would totally hate her if you didn't love her so much. And Jill Monroe? A pocket person. Totally tiny.

Oh! And all the bloggers! They were all so cool. Let me think - Katie, Wendy, Alice, Kate, Ciara...eek, I feel like I'm forgetting someone but I have to admit that names run together after a certain point. They were all awesome and so fun to talk to. And I just want to say, ladies, that...I WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE TWILIGHT SPOILERS! You totally owe me a drink. ;)

More later on Day 2 onward.

still waking up. jane and sb sarah left at the buttcrack of dawn but my flight doesn't leave until later. mental note: next year, get earlier flight. this is for the birds. ;)

so tired, can't really type well on this keyboard, and have much to talk about and not much battery life in which to say it. Last night: Ritas were awesome, though my personal fave, Lisa Kleypas, did not win. Sniff. After Ritas, went and hung out with friends at a restaurant for midnight dinner, and one of us has already been sick. fabulous. came back to room and gossiped until almost 3 am.

so much fun, i totally want to go next year. going to read Meredith duran's DUKE OF SHADOWS on the flight back, because i met meredith and she was awesomesauce. loved her.

just had lunch with Nora Roberts.

NORA ROBERTS YALL, NORA.

Permission to hate me? Granted.

Went to the Avon signing this morning. Went to the Grand Central signing as well.

OMG SO MANY FREE BOOKS. I think I picked up 14 at the Avon signing and 8 or 9 at GCP. There are Berkley and Harlequin signings this afternoon.

It's a total mix of backlist and brand new releases. I have an entire box scored so far, all personalized to me. Delicious!

So yeah, conference is expensive but I bet I have almost $400 in free books anyhow. Will try and post pics later.

Also have sightings of Sherrilyn Kenyon in the wild, but she is always followed by an entourage.

I keep forgetting to take pictures too! Dammit!

I have met a ton of great authors, too many to name atm. So awesome. Pocket party was totally faboo and slightly fancy for a rube like me, but it's all good! Will post more on it later.

Met my editor, who is totally lovely. Micki is very sweet in person and totally knows a ton about the business. I picked her brain with endless questions and it was really great to hear some answers.

Also went to the Keynote Luncheon, where Victoria Alexander was speaking. Because, hello, free meal! After a $25 breakfast, a free meal sounded nice. I sat with a variety of people (including Jenna Peterson) and the conference chicken was not as scary as rumored (though we shall see if it returns). Victoria Alexander was super funny. Loved her speech, and we got free booksies. I think my free book count is up to 10 and I haven't been to any signings yet.

Pocket Dinner tonight,should be fun!

So I totally suck at blogging. More later, but i'm off for a free conference lunch.

Jane is gorgeous and so much fun.

Kresley Cole is beautiful! Andfunny. More later!

Heading off for the night. Waking up at 5 am so I can make sure I catch an 11 am flight (paranoid much? yes.) and to go through my notes one more time, my editor questions, my calendar, and my luggage. Have decided to pack loafers again. Oh the decisions. Unfortunately the only socks that I have that match have polka dots and skulls. I shall be 'quirky' at RWA, I have decided. Or something.

Okay anyhow, I will be blogging when I get there (but not tweeting, because I haven't figured that out yet).

If you go to RWA and want to meet me, I look like this:

( Read more... )

Everyone gets to RWA on Monday/Tuesday of the week. Next time, do not fly out on Wednesday or you will be forced to endlessly click 'refresh' on your blog, hoping for tidbits about the trip.

My roommate flew out today. I'm so jealous. Share the emo tear of sadness with me. *emo*

So, I'm going to RWA, right? First time ever? Have book contract, not quite a book yet? Conference virgin? Yes?

Well, the fabulous Jane of Dear Author has set up a group blog for Nationals, called (unsurprisingly) BlogNationals. Here, a bunch of review-bloggers (and er, me) will be sharing their experience at the RWA Convention and all the wacky hijinx and gossip that is sure to accompany.

Here's the list of bloggers and their sites:

Blog Nationals

• Aimless Ramblings about Living Life
• Dear Author
• Dionne Galace
• for peaceful days and dreamy nights
• Jill Myles
• Nobody asked me…
• Nose in a book
• Ramblings on Romance Etcetera, Etcetera
• Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
• sula’s space
• Wendy_Superlibrarian

Now you might be asking "Which one of these does not belong?" And that's right kids, it's me. I don't review books. One might be puzzled why a n00b author such as myself got invited into such illustrious company, right?

It's because I'm fabulously witty-
I'm the life of the party -
I will offer a refreshing perspective in the midst of all the reviewers
Everyone is JELUS of my upcoming book-
One of them feels sorry for me-
Blackmail-


Jane is my roommate. Sorry to destroy all the mystery. :)

(Secretly, I suspect she invited me out of pity, but I plan to have fun with it anyhow).

Regardless of the facts! I shall be schmoozing with strangers, randomly going "OMG IT'S KRESLEY COLE I LOVE YOU!" in the lobby, showing up at panels and pretending like I know what I'm doing, fishing Meljean out of the local flora (she keeps threatening to hide behind the plants) and basically just having a good time. I'm not in PAN, I have no book to promote (yet) and will not be partaking in the signings. Instead, I will roam like a lone ninja through the lobby, trying desperately to find someone I know and taking pictures of the authors I recognize.

Fun times, right?

Ignore, ignore.