I love attending this conference! I love walking through the lobby or the bar or the meeting room area and encountering friends I haven’t seen in a year. I love meeting friends that I only know from email or the blog. I love the energy and stimulation and excitement the conference creates, making me excited and eager to get home and write. I was in Dallas from Tuesday to Monday. Wednesday was a big day with the Beau Monde conference during the day to the huge Literacy Booksigning in the evening. The Beau Monde conference was devoted to all things Regency. I missed Kalen’s fashion workshop (darn!), but our own Risky, Janet Mullany, gave a very useful and entertaining workshop on servants, and I did get to spend a lot of time with our Risky blogger and friend Keira but I don’t have a photo!!
Here I am at the booksigning with Olivia Gates who writes Mills & Boon Medicals and Silhouette Bombshell. The booksigning raised $58,000 for literacy.

After the signing, I missed the Beau Monde Soiree because Sophia Nash roped me into joining several other authors to go to a Cowboy bar to learn line dancing. Romance Novel TV came along to film the fun. They also interviewed me at the booksigning, so stay tuned to see me on Romance Novel TV!

On Thursday the Harlequin Historical authors including Amanda and me had a Tea at a posh restaurant specializing in desserts. Not only were the desserts fabulous, but this restaurant is the only one I’ve ever encountered that had a TV in the bathroom–showing the cooking channel. Amanda and I and our friend and fellow author, Deb Marlowe went out to dinner with one of the Mills & Boon editors. Friday was the Harlequin Party which was held at the Fairmont Hotel. A group of us intended to share a taxi and wound up in a white stretch Hummer limousine to get there.

Here are Amanda, Deb, and me in the limousine.

Here we are again before the dancing started.

On Saturday I attended a marvelous workshop by Michael Hauge who wrote Writing Screenplays That Sell. He spoke about the essential components of a romance, and I’ll have to talk more about that in another blog someday.

Two Regencies won the RITA in their categories: Julia Quinn’s On the Way to the Wedding for Long Historical and Tracy Anne Warren’s The Husband Trap for Best First Book.

Here is a special photo! Romance Vagabonds Elodie and Manda (seated), me, our blogger, Santa, and Eloisa James!

I’m home now and already missing the new and old friends I saw at RWA!

Any questions about the conference?

We are back from Tennessee, where the scenery basically looks like this. I thought as we drove through the mountains that our Regency characters would have been amazed at the endless trees of the Shenandoah, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Alleghenies.

The family reunion picnic was lovely. We met family we’d never met before and saw folks we had not seen for years. Here we are. All except me, because I’m taking this photo (deliberately distant to protect the family’s privacy) but you can see how many of us came and how lush the picnic area was.

But I got to thinking about the differences in picnics from the Regency time to now . Our picnic was in a public park, not on the grounds of a country estate. We did not have tents erected for shelter from the sun, but the abundant Tennessee trees did a great job of shading our spot. We lugged our own chairs in our own cars and the food was not brought in by servants in horse drawn wagons, rather it arrived in a big SUV. The caterers were certainly not dressed in livery but in Tshirts and bermuda shorts. We ate hot dogs and hamburgers off styrofoam plates and drank (Regency characters may shudder here) iced tea.

There were games for the children – wheelbarrow races, potato sack races, nothing like the decorous maypole dance depicted here.

But I suspect, then as now, we had a wonderful time. The gathering of family and friends is mostly so.

I gave away some of my books. Most of the relatives did not know there was a romance author in the fam. One of my husband’s cousins will be in Dallas at the same time as the Romance Writers Conference and she might come to the booksigning (July 11 5:30 to 7:30 at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas)!

Any family gatherings this summer for any of you? Any family reunion horror stories? Anyone planning to be at the RWA conference or the booksigning?

Maypole image from Jessamyn’s costume pages
Emma photo from the movie Emma