Romance Novel Convention -- Day 2

July 17, 2014 12:42 PM Posted by juliannadouglas

Day 2 of the Romance Novel Convention was a bit busier for me. Hubs went down early to get the schedule to find out when he was teaching his classes. He ended up teaching his class What You Need to Know to Talk to a Web Designer that morning. It was small, but he really enjoyed teaching it and felt like those attending got a lot out of it. While he was busy with that, I attended Victoria Danann's class on Indie Writing As a Business. Much like with Angela Knight's class the day before, Victoria said this was a 20-30 hour course that she'd pared down to only one hour, but it was an hour jam-packed with great information on marketing and promoting books.

After a quick lunch, I went to Character Development in Fiction, another incredibly informative class taught by author and UCLA writing instructor, Victoria Zackheim. I walked into this class and took a seat at a table where only one other lady was sitting. About five or ten minutes into the class, I realized I was sitting next to legendary author Anne Perry. (OMG!) Turns out she's good friends with Victoria and had lots of great things to add to the conversation.

From that class, I went straight into a discussion panel on The Face of New Adult led by Laverne Thompson, Mary Moriarty, V. S. Nelson, and Shea MacLeod. It was interesting to listen to each of their perspectives on this relatively new category of literature.

That evening was one of my favorite events, the Costume Ball. It was thrown by NYT bestselling author Sharon Hamilton to celebrate the launch of her latest SEALs book. The theme was Military MASH with everything decorated with in a military style and clips of military movies playing on the big screen. Just like at the Kick-Off Party there was lots of music and dancing. Later in the evening some of the donated gift baskets were raffled off, including my Sweetly Sensual Romance Basket. I never did get to see who won it though.:-( Hubs and I finally called it a night around 10:30 PM before my basket was given away. Yeah, I know, we're definitely light-weights and not party animals.:-)

I loved seeing everyone in their costumes. We hung with D. T. Dyllin and her hubs who were dressed very smartly in their Regency wear. I think they definitely stole the show and had lots of request for pictures. As promised, my hubs and my costumes tied in with previous blog posts about something I love, and that was... drum roll please... Firefly. My hubby was Mal, and I was Kaylee. Unfortunately though, this not being Comic Con, we were hard-pressed to find anyone who knew who we were dressed as. We're pretty sure the assistant event photographer knew, and weirdly enough, I found out after the fact that two authors were huge Firefly fans. Darnit! Where were they during the Ball, and why didn't they notice us? Oh well, no biggie! I'm not really an attention hog anyway. I totally expected that, and I know that when we finally manage a trip to Comic Con, we're going to be swarmed by admirers. All in all, Day 2 turned out to be pretty fun.

Here are some pics of me and hubby in our costumes.

Categories: Events

Tags: Angela Knight, Anne Perry, D. T. Dyllin, Firefly, Kaylee Frye, LaVerne Thompson, Malcolm Reynolds, Mary Moriarty, Romance Novel Convention, Sharon Hamilton, Shea MacLeod, V. S. Nelson, Victoria Danann, Victoria Zackheim