God bless talking to people in elevators! I chatted up Laurie Blanchard, the book blogger from Dangerous Romance, at random — turns out she’s amazing and cool! We went to lunch together yesterday afterwards and I’m so glad I met her!
After lunch, I went to Dean Koontz’s talk in the afternoon. I’ll admit that at first I was going just to go, because saying I was going to a conference that he was at finally gave people context for my writing life. They could care less who else I want to know, and not want to know why I want to know them, but name drop Koontz, and they’re all, “Of course!”
Well, as it turns out — he’s hilarious. Like laugh out loud funny. I could have easily listened to him do Q&A for hours. There was a fire alarm in the middle of it :P, but I stayed back for a bit, until the alarm stopped and the talk continued :D.
After that I killed some time and then went to the vampire dinner theater show/dinner thing with Laurie and her husband. I don’t want to say it was bad, but, um…I think there were a lot of in jokes that would have made more sense if I could tell which authors the actors were beneath their wigs. Post that, drinks made everything more fun ;).
Today I went to breakfast near Echo Park with Laurie again, and then we did the Book Fair together. The book fair was super impressive, with tons of great authors. I’m glad I’m driving back, it made it easier to buy more books ;).
Then dinner with L.E. and I got to sit and pick his brains for hours about the ins and outs of having a long lasting publishing career. I know that there’s no solution, or even one way to do things, but getting advice from someone who has published 40 books and is still going strong is awesome.
I’ve got a few alert hours left tonight, in which I’ll get ahead of the reading curve for Blue Heaven. Then tomorrow, the long drive home :D