I’m stealing this post that I wrote for the Carina Press blog yesterday. If you’re going to be at RT, make sure you pay special attention to the bit about Club RT and the Carina Press luncheon (for a chance to win a nook) and take note of my Friday workshop on digital readers with Jane Litte and Sarah Wendell, and think about attending (for a chance to win a Sony).

I’ll be attending the Romantic Times Convention in Columbus, Ohio next week as will Aideen O’Leary-Chung, who will be there on behalf of both Carina Press and Harlequin. Below is a list of places you’ll be able to catch up with us. Even if you don’t attend any of the workshops I’m giving, I hope you’ll attend the Carina luncheon on Friday (there will be goodies!) where I’ll be giving an introduction speech. And please do find me and say hello!

Wednesday April 26th 10am-12:15pm, Everything Digital Publishing(that’s not actually the title but I don’t remember what RT thought sounded like a good idea for a title), presenting with author Lauren Dane. During this workshop, Lauren and I will present you with information about publishing in both the traditional and digital-first world. We’ll have a candid conversation with you about the pros and cons of digital publishing, and we’ll give you honest answers to your questions. Come prepared to have us talk with you, not to you!

Thursday April 27th 2:45-3:45pm Editor Panel

Moderated by author Judi McCoy, I join a long list of other editors on a panel to answer questions about our presses and what we’re looking for

Friday April 28th

10am: Carina Press Spotlight. Join Aideen and I in a conversation about Carina Press, our upcoming launch, our acquisitions, submissions process and any questions you might have!

11:15-12:15pm: Reading Digital (pay special attention to this one)

Along with Jane Litte of Dear Author and Sarah Wendell of SmartBitches, we’ll present a large variety of digital reading devices, discuss with you how to choose which device to buy, what online retailers are available for you to shop at, how DRM can impact your shopping and what formats you should look for. Basically, we’re going to talk everything necessary to read digitally and give you the opportunity to see the devices up close and personal. Not only that, but I’ve heard a rumor that there’s going to be a device for giveaway AND a coupon code to an online bookstore. This might be one you don’t want to miss!

12:30 Carina Press luncheon

Join us for martini mashed potatoes, cupcakes and a celebration of the Carina Press launch. There will be goodies and cover art and Carina Press authors! And there will be a giveaway of a nook!

Sometime Friday afternoon…editor appointments. I’m taking pitches Friday afternoon. Are you signed up?

Club RT Thursday 9am – 12 & 2-4pm; Friday 9am – 12 & 2-4pm

In addition to all of that, we’ll also have a table at Club RT. Aideen will have a variety of devices for you to handle (nook, a couple of Sonys, Kindle, etc) and there will be a sign up for a drawing for a nook, to be given away during the Carina Press luncheon on Friday (must be present to win!) as well as sign up for 2 winners to receive all of our launch titles (and that might just be more books than you suspect!). Visit Aideen at Club RT Thursday and Friday for your chance to win, check out the devices and get some Carina promo goodness!

So, who’s going to be at RT?

I know I already complained about this once on the blog, but I am DONE with the snow. It’s not just the fact that it’s snowed more where we live than it did the previous five years. Or the fact that it’s snowing again. No, it’s the fact that these snow storms are also managing to coincide with my travel. Because, you know, hanging out in the airport and figuring out how to get to/from conferences via plane, train and automobile is JUST how I want to spend my time. You?

So yep, as I type this, I’ve made it from NYC to Philly and I’m in the Philly airport. Right now my flight home is just delayed, not canceled yet. Yet. I’ve been here for an hour and it was so tempting to just assume the flight would be canceled and to go ahead and rent a car. I could be home in just a few hours. But I’m waiting and we’re under a 45 minute delay right now. I expect more to come. Whee!

On the other hand, I did have a fantastic trip to NYC where I was attending and presenting at the Tools of Change conference. I gave two presentations at the conference, and also got a chance to go to the Harlequin NY offices and meet with some of the editorial staff there, and talk about Carina. My favorite thing! Tools of Change is a conference that I love, because I get to meet up with and talk to people from all areas of publishing. Three days of talking about publishing and listening to how others are innovating? Fascinating and energizing.

I’m hoping to share a bit more about what I did there (including more about my presentations) when I’m more fully rested and not stuck in an airport wondering if I’ll ever get home!

About my blog! But I must admit, anything interesting I have to say recently has gone to Twitter. I’m gearing up to leave for RWA tomorrow and it’s pretty doubtful I’ll have much time to blog. So I’ve arranged a line-up of authors/editors to fill in for me. So this week I’ll have guest posts from:

Tuesday: Sasha White
Wednesday: Jaci Burton
Thursday: Shannon Stacey
Friday: Tera Kleinfelter, Samhain editor
Saturday: Lynne Connolly

And remember, if you want to share in my RWA adventures, you can follow them on Twitter (link to the right). You don’t have to belong to Twitter to read my page.

If you’re at RWA and see me, please make sure you say hello.

I left my Twitter friends hanging last night. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that my travel luck has been…poor…lately. Ever since February, when Delta lost my bags twice in two weeks, things have gone crazy when I try to travel. This past trip, on my way to Cincinnati, my flight was canceled, they were going to keep me in the airport for ten hours before the next flight (after generously giving me a FIVE DOLLAR meal voucher) so I opted for rerouting to Dayton. But not before running into my ex-husband in an airport in a city in which neither of us live. Travel karma, I haz it.

So on the way back, I was bemoaning that I was once again facing bad travel mojo, as my flight was delayed an hour and a half (and once again US Airways wouldn’t let me on an earlier flight due to checked luggage. I HATE that policy), putting me home at midnight. I was grateful the flight wasn’t canceled (since it was the last flight out of the day) and thought that once I boarded, my travel woes were done. Not so.

The flight from Philadelphia to my town is not a long one, maybe 40 minutes. It was late at night, I was tired and a little irritable and so I didn’t appreciate it when the flight attendant spent the entire flight standing in the aisle talking to the woman in front of me. In fact, she spent so long talking to her that she did none of the final landing announcements (turn off portable electronics, put your seat backs and tray tables up, make sure your seatbelts are fastened) and didn’t take her seat until we were almost touching down. Ergh. So I was mildly irritated by that, but having her stand there did put m in the unique position of seeing the absolute panic on her face when a large thump sounded on our side of the plane. And then hear her say “what was that?” before she hurried to the front to call the pilots. I know, reassuring, right?

Turns out we hit a bird. Thankfully, it didn’t get into one of the engines, but it still scared the hell out of the flight attendant and a few of the passengers.

So as I’m sitting on the plane, I’m just thankful my bad travel mojo hasn’t resulted in death for anything but the poor bird. And as we land, I’m glad for the end of my travel adventures. Ahahahaha…how wrong I was.

Since we landed so late (not quite midnight) I called a taxi to come and get me rather than having Josh drag Brianna out of bed. I called from the plane to expedite the process, and only had to wait a few minutes after I got my luggage for the taxi to arrive. Well, it turns out another man had also called a taxi, so the driver decided to take both of us. Fine with me. Of course, as we’re leaving the airport, we see another taxi–from another company–coming our way. Um, yeah, turns out that guy had gotten into my taxi. He’d called a different company. No big deal, the town isn’t that big, we’ll deliver him to his hotel, The Country Inn and Suites, and I’ll get home within minutes. Riiiight. The taxi driver starts telling us a story of one of the drivers being mugged just minutes earlier, and then was telling me another was shot at several nights before. We talk about the crime in town for about 15 minutes while driving to…The Comfort Inn. When we pull up, I mention that the gentleman is staying at the Country Inn and Suites and off we go again, the taxi driver saying “oh okay, of course, I know where that is…” as he takes us ten minutes later…to the Marriott Residence Inn. At this point, I’m pulling out my iPhone to get the address (because I really don’t remember ever seeing the Country Inn and Suites so I can’t recall where it’s at) and the driver calls the hotel. Turns out the hotel is actually pretty close to where we started at the airport. So our third stop is, thank God, the actual Country Inn and Suites. We took that poor man on a tour of the area that he didn’t need to see–and he had to be up for meetings in five hours.

By this time, I’ve been traveling around with the taxi driver for almost 45 minutes, and am just giggling to myself because 1) my husband is asleep and if that driver had decided to drive me to Baltimore, I’m not sure he’d have noticed until morning and 2) I think the driver (Tony) was kind of glad for the company because he talked my ear off. and 3) at one point he’d pulled out a taser stick and demo’d it for me and the other passenger, and then told us of the gun he carried under his seat (we were talking about how dangerous it was to be a taxi driver). Is it weird that I wasn’t nervous about this adventure at all? At the end of it all, he got me home, yes he did charge me full fare for a trip from the airport (there’s no meter, it’s a flat fee) and he gave me his card so I could ask for him by name next time I needed a taxi. And you know what? I probably will. Because I’m crazy like that.

So, who wants to travel with me?

I couldn’t attend BEA this year, but I was able to follow along thanks to the #BEA09 Twitter feed. It’s actually kind of interesting to follow along this way because you get a sense of the overall picture from a number of people, rather than just one person’s limited observations. Here’s what I got from Friday’s Twitter Feed (links embedded will be a mix of websites and links to Twitter feeds):

1) Chris Brogan seemed to hit a home run with his morning presentation on Trust Agents. People were still Twittering about it hours later (you can see his slides on his website)

2) Many people were excited to report Julie Andrews sightings.

3) Once those sightings died down, others were excited they got to meet Bob from Sesame Street.

4) Reports were that there wasn’t as much swag at BEA this year. Likely an indication of the effect of the economy on publishers.

5) But despite that, there was a lot of buzz on the #bea09 Twitter tag about Chronicle Books‘ tote bags, which were said to be awesome (and did look cool in the picture). They were designed by @nuzzles(Laura Bagnato) and http://www.jeffcanham.com/

6) Many mentions of two booths that had “booth girls” going around in either bikinis or nude bodysuits. Sourcebooks and the COOL-er Reader. I saw only one person speak positively of it, the other mentions were not impressed. I do think it was an odd choice, especially for Sourcebooks.

This Teleread article has a picture of the Cool-er booth.

7) Speaking of the COOL-er Reader, a lot of buzz about ppl checking this out, especially because of the bright look, lower price than Sony and Mac compatibility (though Sony is fully compatible w/ Mac thanks to Calibre). I saw more mention of this than I did of the BeBoook, though I did see one picture of the BeBook. I would like to see/use both of these so I can compare/contrast with the Sony and the Kindle. I’ve already had one person emailing for my thoughts on the BeBook. I can’t give any right now, sorry!

Pictures of the Cool-er Reader at the show in this Teleread article.

The Espresso Book Machine was another oft-mentioned exhibit on the Twitter Feed. Lots of positive mention of this.

9) Someone at the panel, Do Publishers Still Hold the Keys to the Kingdom, Authors Weigh In #pubkeys, apparently made the statement “no one wants ebooks for Christmas”. This is such an uniformed statement, I can’t even fully express my frustration with it. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

10) The BEAtweetUp with its personalized badges and amazing organizers was the not-to-be-missed event of BEA. It appeared to be THE social event of BEA. Kudos to the organizers, headed by Kat Meyer.

11) Most sought after author appeared to be Neil Gaiman @neilhimself I was so taken in with the Twitter buzz surrounding his appearance, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have been squeeing to get a sighting of him even though (I reluctantly admit for fear of lynching from fans) that I’ve never read his books.

12) The blogger signing booth sponsored by Firebrand and NetGalley seemed to be a huge success. Bloggers have fans! (but we already knew that).

Pictures in this article from Teleread.

13) Connectivity was difficult at Javits. Multiple, multiple complaints about being able to access wifi, whether on laptop or phone. This might have contributed to less people Twittering, but the #bea09 tag was still active. Presenters trying to stream video during their panels were unable to with provided wi-fi. Ouch.

14) People reported that attendance numbers might be down, but the floor was still busy and the positive energy was high. I have a suspicion that social media like Twitter has helped build this positive energy and caused people to be even more enthused to attend and network/exchange ideas than ever before.

15) For the win: HarperCollins gave out digital ARCs instead of paper ARCs. I have mad jealousy that I didn’t get to check this out, especially since Diana Peterfreund said her upcoming book, Rampant, was one of those dig-ARCs. Big props to HarperCollins for taking this step.

Anyone notice anything significant that I left out? I’m looking forward to watching the Twitter feed today (as much as is possible on a Saturday).

ETA: The first thing to say is that a pitch isn’t necessarily about selling your book to an agent/editor. Time to move out of that mindset! Read on…

Here’s another one to file under conversations from Twitter. This came up this past weekend in a conversation about Blood and Chocolate by Annette Kurtis Clause. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it. Someone (@lihsa, follow the link for her article on it) on Twitter asked for a review/description and the challenge was on. 140 character review for a book? It’s the “elevator pitch” at its most refined!

Now, it’s been a few years since I read Blood and Chocolate so even though it’s one of the books I recommend often when someone asks for paranormal YA, I still had to stop and think how to refine it in an interesting way. Years after I’d read it. Hard!

I came up with: teenage female werewolf struggles to find acceptance in a world that doesn’t know about the supernatural. Moody, dark and emotional.

I don’t think it’s the best review/pitch but it does start to refine the ideas. I could make it punchier, ramp up the hook, really get someone interested. Let’s see…

Rebelling against her society. Searching for love. Desperate for a chance. Can this teen wolf reconcile what she is with who she wants to be?

Hmm, I’m not sure. I’m actually over by one character but I figure if I delete a space, I’ll be okay. What do you think? Better? It took me 15 minutes of fiddling to come up with that versus the first one, which I just popped off the top of my head.

But what I’m getting at is that it’s important to be able for authors to refine your book to its purest hook. The conflict, the angst, the info that’s going to make a reader, editor or agent want to pick it up to read, go find an excerpt, request a full or keep reading your query letter.

TV does this with what they call log lines. A one sentence hook meant to engage the viewer and get them to watch the show. Something that will easily fit in the TV guide or, for many of us now, on the guide channel. There’s no second chances when the viewer has only that guide to look at and base their decision off of. So the log line has to be good enough to convince the viewer to turn the channel right then and there, without a bunch of extranneous detail or someone saying “oh wait, that didn’t quite hook you? Well let me tell you just a little more”. The log line is it. The same should be considered true of the elevator pitch or, for purposes of my blog post, the Twitch (Twitter pitch. Ha! I’m funny).

At Samhain, we do something similar with each of our books’ blurbs, but we call it a tagline. If you go over to the website, the tagline is what you see on this page. Something to pique the interest of readers browsing our website, to entice them to click through to the book’s blurb and then excerpt.

I remember being at a conference a few years back and someone at our lunch table asking another author there about the book she wrote. I remember it was a historical but that’s all I remember because she spent the next 15 minutes talking, in depth, about the plot of her book and all the details. Ouch. Those are the times that I have to really struggle to pay attention. It’s harder if it happens during a pitch session because, let’s be honest, it’s hard for any of us to be talked to for 8 to 10 minutes without drifting off and thinking about lunch (unless you’re at lunch, in which case you’re thinking about your post-lunch nap and how much you’d like one). But I can be hooked by a plot refined down to its most interesting conflicts and ideas. Something that either makes me want to ask questions and find out more, or go buy the book and find out more.

In other words, the elevator pitch isn’t just for elevators. It’s for pitch sessions, query letters, the bar, NOT the bathroom, the bookstore, standing in line at the grocery store…well you get the idea. You’re selling your book. To whoever is your audience. Maybe it’s a reader, maybe it’s your dream agent. But the only way to sell it is to get them interested.

All this is to circle back around to what Twitter can do for your pitch. Twitter is currently the largest social media platform behind only Facebook and MySpace. But I believe it’s more open than Facebook or MySpace. Unless you have your Twitter account marked as private, anyone can read your Twitter page. Even those not “following” you. And you may end up with people following your Twitters that you might not have had the opportunity to communicate with/to anywhere else. But Twitter only allows you to type 140 characters (that’s spaces, letters and punctuation). It teaches you to refine your thoughts to the purest level and type only what you need to get the thought out there. And it’s because of those limitations that Twitter can help you refine your pitch. You only have 140 characters and you have a new book releasing, a new writing project in the works, etc (**please read side note at end of this post) and you want to tell people about it. How do you do that in 140 characters or less? You take your elevator pitch (you have one, right?) and you pare it down even further. No, it’s not easy, but once you do it, you can use it everywhere. Book promo, pens, websites, business cards, social media and in person.

Okay, you got it? So let’s hear your Twitch! If you don’t belong to Twitter and want to make sure you’re not going over the 140 character, open Notepad or something similar and let it do the count for you. If enough people leave their Twitter pitches in the comments, I’ll pull a few out and highlight their books/websites/blogs next week in a separate blog post. Ready, get set, Twitch!

**side note: please don’t query editors/agents on Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace. It’s really not the appropriate place because most of us use social media as a mix of work, pleasure and goofing off, and we’d prefer to get business related proposals that follow our submissions guidelines at our submissions email address.

The confession today is that I’m so sick, being upright is a struggle. I flew home yesterday (3 flights total and 12 hours of travel time/layovers) with winds gusting to 50 mph and a raging case of the flu. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. Yeah.

I’ve never been so happy to be home, where I could huddle in bed and have my husband coddle me. And I was even happier (to be home safely) when I woke up this morning and heard about the plane that crashed here on the East Coast, with no survivors. So I’m trying hard not to whine too much about how nauseous I am or what a miserable travel experience I had.

Anyway, rather than the rather massive page of links I normally give you, I’m going to link you to some things from the conference I attended this week, the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York City. Really, it was a fabulous conference and it for exceeded my expectations. I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did, but I attribute that to my inner geek, which silently squeed in joy at every keynote and panel I attended. But mostly I attribute it to the amazing people I got to meet and chat with, none of whom got that glazed-eye look when I talked about things like DRM, social media, target audience, eink devices or other things regarding digital publishing. If anything, they were even more passionate about it than me!

Tools of Change conference notes from Mark Coker

The Tools of Change twitter feed and a raw dump of the feed from Andrew Savakis

The best of TOC is available as a free book here

See my interpretive dance

A post with some thoughts on my (our) panel along with a link to a video interview with SB Sarah.

Kassia gave a small preview of what we’d be chatting about in the panel.

SarahW has a post on what she got out of the panel.

Links to some of the incredible people I met at Tools of Change:

Ron Hogan of Beatrice.com

Richard Nash of Soft Skull

Kirk Biglione–awesome husband to Kassia Kroszer of Booksquare, who is equally as awesome. Individually, they’re slightly frightening but together they’re awe-inspiring and intimidating as hell.

Colleen Lindsey, who I met at the Monday night TweetUp and swore I’d met before. Very, very funny and bright lady.

Of course there were many others, but since this short post has now taken me all day to write thanks to the stupid flu, perhaps I should post it before the day is over?

And on a related side note, the #1 thing I learned from the TOC conference? I want to be smart like that. Oh my god those people are bright, amazing and talented. I wonder if God could suddenly endow me thusly?

But seriously, if you have any interest in techno-geekery and digital content, TOC is a conference you should think about for 2010. It rocked!

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Yesterday already seems like it was an eternity ago. It’s amazing how much you can pack into a few days.

Yes, my luggage did show up. When I woke Monday morning, my message light was flashing. Luggage was here! The hotel had it up to me in five minutes. It was so nice to know I was going to have fresh clothes to wear (and a coat!)

First thing Monday morning I had a meeting to do an evaluation of the O’Reilly website and Conflink. It was a paying gig, lasted 45 minutes and at the end I was handed moolah. Score! Once that was done I did what was the most critical part of this trip: I searched out the nearest Lush and booked it over there. I haven’t been in a Lush store in months and I think I was going through withdrawals.

It was neat because it was about a 15 minute walk away so I got to see some of the city on my walk. After hitting Lush, I walked back on a different street, browsed Times Square, did the tourist thing by hitting M&M World (where I got some souvenirs for Brianna) and Hershey’s.

After that it was lunch with Cindy Hwang and Leis Pederson from Berkley at Ruby Foo’s where we stuffed ourselves and had some great conversation. Chatting with both of them is always a lot of fun!

I came back to the hotel in a food coma, but did not nap (thought about it) and instead watched a couple episodes of Chuck Season 2. Then it was off to the races again!

I met Erin Galloway and Alissa Davis from Dorchester for drinks and tapas at Kemia Bar. Convenient for me because that’s where the TweetUp was later. Even though the hostess kept trying to tell me I’d have to leave at 8:30 because of the private party. She just did not believe I was invited to said private party. Again, Erin and Alissa were fabulous fun to meet and chat with. The great thing about conferencing in NYC: meeting up with publishing people I respect so much!

Erin and Alissa had to leave me as the TweetUp was starting. I have to admit,I was nervous about this since I wasn’t really going to know anyone, but Kassia Kroszer was a fantastic hostess and I got to meet some incredibly fascinating industry professionals from all areas that I would never have otherwise had the chance to meet. I must not have had too terrible a time since I was there to the end (sometime around 11pm). Second night in a row I didn’t get to bed until after midnight.

Conclusion: Day 2 of my NYC trip made me very glad to be both in the city and at the conference.

Yesterday I traveled to NYC. It wasn’t the best day of traveling I’ve ever had. Because I live in a small town, I had to hop three flights to get to NYC. I don’t normally mind flying, so this wasn’t a big deal to me.

But the first flight was really turbulent, horribly, horribly hot (I stripped down to my tank top, thank goodness I always travel in layers) and came complete with screaming toddler directly behind me. Really, I didn’t blame him. Thankfully, it was a short hop so the misery was over quickly.

The second flight was fine and I had a two hour layover in Norfolk,Virginia, where I had to switch airlines and so, leave security, go to another concourse and re-enter security. Bleh. The flight was overbooked but since I had Mamma Mia tickets, I couldn’t give up my seat. I was pleased because it was a plane with one row of single seats on one side (double on the other) and I was in a single so I had a window and an aisle seat all in one. But then…we waited. And waited. For over an hour we sat on the tarmac waiting for the okay from air traffic control to take off. Too much traffic over JFK so they wouldn’t release us. Bleh. I started to worry about making the show.

We finally did land at JFK around 5pm and since the show was at 7pm, I figured I was good. Until I discovered that I had made it but my bag hadn’t. Ugh. Even better, I had packed my coat in my suitcase since I had no need of it while traveling (it was gorgeous everywhere I went). So without luggage or coat, I hopped a cab to Times Square and my hotel. And discovered I dislike both the NY cab experience and NY traffic.

I did make it to my hotel by just after 6, got checked in (by that time I was convinced the next thing to go wrong would be a lost hotel reservation),threw my stuff in my room and booked it to the theater. Slightly chilly but not too bad. I made it with 20 minutes to spare!

Mamma Mia was fabulous, amazing, awesome, energetic, ginormously fun and all other good adjectives you can think of. I loved every minute. I grinned the whole time. I saw the movie a few weeks ago, and liked it, but it doesn’t capture the magic, depth or sheer talent of the stage show. Did I mention I loved it?

For the first act, I was sitting at the back of the orchestra seats, with half a row to myself (a pole separated me from the other half). I was totally fine with this. The seats were great and I had little problem seeing, though I am kind of short (don’t tell my husband I admitted to that). When I came back from intermission, my row was full! I guess some other people didn’t like their seats so they moved because, as they said “when we looked over, all we saw was one little girl sitting all by herself”. That would be me. They were very nice, but the lady used her seat and then half of mine for her arm space. But after some rearranging, we got things squared away and I also ended up with, don’t laugh, a booster cushion. Which was good since I was in a different seat with a taller man in front of me.

People are always curious to know why I’m somewhere by myself. I’m so used to going to things solo, it never occurs to me that it’s not the norm, but I guess most people do go to shows with friends. So the lady asked me why, I said I was traveling for work. From their the conversation went on to that I’m in publishing, we publish romance, and yes there is a lot of demand for “that sort of book”. I always love to watch people’s faces as they process “romance”. Yes, romance for women. Books about love. Yes, lots of people buy it. Yes, I do like it. Yes, that’s what Harlequin publishes (or Mills and Boon if you’re having this conversation in Australia/New Zealand or other parts of Europe).

The second act was as fabulous as the first and the lady next to me and I immediately jumped up to dance at the end. Not too many others were standing and dancing, but we didn’t care. Then in the second encore song, some random guy in the front stood,then a lady and just like that, the whole audience was standing and dancing (how they resisted the first song, I don’t know). What a fun way to end the show, with three encore songs (Mamma Mia, Dancing Queen and Waterloo for those wondering), bright colors and high energy. I left the theater totally energized and upbeat. Just what I needed after my day of traveling.

I wandered Times Square for awhile, the energy of it is just a lot of fun at night (haven’t been during the day yet). At one point, I happened by the backstage door where the cast of In the Heights was coming out to sign autographs and people were screaming. Made me wish I had time to see it (but I don’t).

So while I didn’t love the cab or the NY traffic experience, the show, the downtown area of Times Square, the energy and even the kind of jaded, slightly unfriendly and sometimes rude people have all been a really unique experience. Especially when you add in Batman. Did I forget to mention he was in the middle of the street last night? Yeah.

Welcome to NYC. Where, apparently, anything goes.

Do you attend conferences? If so, which ones? Right now, I’m setting my schedule for 2009 and these are the conferences I’ll be at:

February: O’Reilly Tools of Change in NYC
April: Romantic Times in Orlando
June: Lori Foster in Ohio
July: RWA Nationals in Washington D.C.
October: Novelists, Inc in St. Louis
October: NJRW in New Jersey

So far this year, my travel schedule isn’t as busy as 2008 and I haven’t gotten as many invitations to regional events, though it’s still early in 2009 and those often come later. In addition to those conferences, I’m also going to be speaking for two local chapters, but that’s it! I am sending another editor, Lindsey McGurk, to a conference in Denver in May.

Anyway, I’ve been giving a workshop on epublishing in general but specifically on how to research publishers. Since I’ve given that workshop at NJRW, I’d like to come up with something new. Do any of you have any suggestions for topics for workshops that you’d attend if it was offered? I want to stick with epublishing, since it’s what I know, but it can be a bit broader as well.

Oh, and if you’re going to be at any of those conferences, please look me up and say hi!