Romance Novel Convention 2015 -- Day 3

July 5, 2015 04:42 PM Posted by juliannadouglas

Day 3 of Romance Novel Convention started out much like Day 1, in an exhausted blur. Maybe I was on too much of a high after the previous night's costume ball, but I woke in the middle of the night and couldn't go back to sleep. As a consequence, I was running on about five hours of sleep, but somehow I got my butt out of bed and made it down to the first class period of the day at 9 a.m.

I attended classes all morning, starting with Fiona Jayde's “Get Yourself Covered: A Pre-Launch Strategy.” Since I'm about to launch a brand new book in my Loving Hearts series this month, I thought this would be a good class to take, and I definitely learned some important things from it. Next, I went to the panel discussion, “Developing a Series and Creating Your World Inside It,” where I got some good tips that will hopefully help me with a couple of paranormal series ideas I have. To round out the morning, I attended Randi Alexander and Jackson Young's class, “Branding Brainstorming.” There I got some new ideas for building my author brand.

When I got out of class, my hubby was waiting for me, and imagine my surprise when he told me we, along with Jossilynn and Natalie and her husband, Will, were all invited to the Male Model Muncheon. This was a special event for the first fifty registered attendees only. Of course, our wonderful host, Jimmy Thomas, was there, along with his brother, Billy Thomas, Julian Mora, David Nicholl, Winsor Harmon, and RNCasanova, Paul Gunn, so we ladies had some lovely man-candy to ogle while enjoying a delicious meal of salad, rolls, herb-roasted chicken and potatoes. Then we had a decadent dessert of chocolate cake with raspberry filling. Yum!!

After that I decided to goof off for a while. The hubs and I spent some time in our room and then shared a nice conversation with JossiLynn, Natalie, and Will, as well as with author, Jet Arnett, another lovely lady I met at RNC, and her husband. Later, I went to Randi and Jackson's Meet and Greet, where I learned more about how they started working together, as well as Jackson's country music career and his relatively new endeavor Mini-Movies Book Trailers. There was some lively conversation and Jackson signed photos for all of us. Of course, he signed mine to “Shy Girl.” He was also gracious enough after everyone else had left to answer some questions I had about a music-related dream I have for the next book I'm planning to write.

Natalie and Will got reservations for us at Toby Keith's Restaurant inside the hotel, so around 6 p.m. we met up with them and JossiLynn there for an amazing dinner. I had the Honey Barbecue Salmon with baked potato and Southern green beans, all of which were quite delicious. But what I enjoyed most of all was the camaraderie, conversation, and laughter we all shared that evening. I'm still marveling at how easily we all connected. In fact, we were all enjoying ourselves so much, our waiter had to ask us to leave when we were finished, because they needed the table for other customers.;-)

That night, we were supposed to get a Night Out in Vegas courtesy of RNC. Feeling unmotivated to travel anywhere, we all chose to go to the Improv there at Harrah's, but due to a miscommunication on my part (I didn't see Jimmy's text until the next night - Oops!), the employees at the box office didn't know what we were talking about when we arrived at the comedy club. All of us were pretty exhausted though, so none of us could be bothered to care, especially me. After two sleep deprived nights and extroverting more than I probably ever have in my life, I was half-tempted to bail even if we had figured it out. We decided to call it an early night, so JossiLynn could make her flight home the next day and Natalie and I would be well-rested for the upcoming book fair the next day. More on that in my next post.:-)

Categories: Events

Tags: Billy Thomas, David Nicholl, Fiona Jayde, Jackson Young, Jet Arnett, Jimmy Thomas, JossiLynn, Julian Mora, Natalie Wilson, Paul Gunn, Randi Alexander, Romance Novel Convention, Winsor Harmon