Romantic Times Hangover

Whoa. What a week!

I'm back from the Romantic Times convention in Kansas City, and taking a much needed recovery day. I had an absolute blast--a lot of YAY!  with a few moments of Oh, No!

1) Riding to KC in my new car

Me and Jess

YAY:  The car goes really fast, and we didn't get any tickets. Jessica Lemmon and I yammered the whole way.

Oh, No!:  That is one seriously long-ass ride. I mean LOOOOONG. And coming home was even longer.

 2) There were cover models

YAY: There were cover models.

Oh, No!: They can run really fast, and are hard to catch.

3)Stalking Andrew Shaffer and Tiffany Reisz

 YAY: Andrew wasn't really hard to find. He tweeted the whole conference, and didn't seem to miss much. We finally cornered him at the book signing.  If you look above, he even participated in the cover model procession across the stage. 

Oh, No!: Tiffany Reisz wasn't as easy to find. And when I did finally connect with her, she was hiding under the book table, trying to...Well, just look carefully at the picture below. 

 4) The hotel was haunted. 

YAY: okay, there's nothing yay about a haunted hotel, except it was fun to speculate about.

Oh, No!: The hotel room drawers wouldn't stay closed, and the elevator was a little weird about following directions.

My roommates, Maisey Yates and Jessica Lemmon, in the haunted elevator

 5) The interesting party favors from Ellora's cave

YAY!: um, they're interesting

Oh, No!: It's just a lava lamp, and it doesn't vibrate.

6) Meeting my internet writer friends: 

YAY!  Linda Grimes!

YAY! Christine Bell! 

 Oh, NO!: I didn't get pictures of everyone. I also got to have lunch with Suzanne Johnson, and I ran into ...Oh, hell. I'm not even going to try to list everyone I saw.

7) I met Jude Deveraux

YAY!: She was really nice, which is good, because she was my very first favorite romance author. 

Oh, No!: I couldn't think of anything to say. 

8) I got to hang out and chat with Ruthie Knox and Cara McKenna. 

Me, Ruthie, and Cara

YAY!: I love, love, love these women. So smart and funny and wonky. 

Oh, No!: I probably over-shared while we were talking about...stuff, thus ensuring my place in their "people to avoid next year" lists. I took out my verbal filters before RT and the replacements are on back-order. 

9) There was a secret BDSM starter kit included with the swag we collected. We had to kind of hunt through things, but with a bit of creativity and not much sleep, three romance writers can be very, very inventive.

YAY!: I have never laughed so much. We did a very clever little twitter photo essay.

Oh, No!: We might be the funniest people we know. When we tried to show people later, those who hadn't seen it on twitter, it wasn't quite as funny.

Maisey paddles Jessica with something that other people might use as a fan.

There is a lot of other cool stuff that happened that I didn't get pictures of, so the Yay is the fun stuff, the Oh No! is the lack of pictures.

We went to a party hosted by  Megan Mulry and Sasha Hananananannananarananan. I may have engaged in a bit of hyperbole with Sasha's last name. You might also recognize her as @caribbeanaccent. That was fun, and Sasha brought a lot of...interesting...treats from Trinidad. The pickled cherries are still confusing me.

I met a lot of my Entangled Publishing co-workers. I'm not going to try to list everyone, but I'm just going to say that I am so thrilled to be working with these folks. Liz Pelletier is amazing, and the people she has involved are awesome.

What else?  I met Landra and Riley Darkes.

I sat in the lobby at the same time as E.L. James. Okay, whatever. Jessica and Maisey got their pictures taken with her.

I got to hang out with my peeps from the Seymour Agency. Our author spotlight gala thing went really well, and meeting my agent, Nicole, in person, was wonderful. She totally rocks, and I am totally motivated to start earning us some money!

I'll probably share a little more about the trip as I recover from the cold that Jessica and I picked up for the ride home. Between the two of us, we went through most of a box of Puffs Plus between KC and Ohio. Grrrr.

Introducing Tucker University: a Story of SWAG FAIL

Gah!

So, in my exteme excitement over my upcoming trip to RT in Kansas City, I've invested about sixty times more in swag than I'll earn with my first advance (that might be an exaggeration, but not by too much). 

I decided that I needed book marks, but not just plain book marks, I had to put tassels on them.  You know, so people will maybe spend an extra half second deciding to throw them out.

I also made the very cool Book Thongs, which I showed you the other day.  Those are actually pretty fun to make, and my poor arthritic hands are only mildly crippled right now. Okay, actually, I didn't realize my hands are arthritic until I'd made fifty of those summbiches, but still. Only mildly crippled, and I do have a prescription for dicolfenac.

I wanted something to showcase my book, Deadly Chemistry. But I don't have a cover yet.

So, hey! I thought I'd make something up that pokes fun at the setting: the prestigious, albeit fictional Tucker University, in Tucker, Kentucky.  The mascot is the Trojan.

I am incredibly proud of myself for being so darned clever. Hopefully not quite so clever that noone else gets the joke here.

So what's the problem, you might ask? It might be a little fuzzy, and granted...the writing is TINY...but I misspelled my own fake name there at the bottom!  I left off the "e" at the end of "Ann."

GAH!

My favorite daughter's suggestions was to fix it with a sharpie, but I'm thinking that might look just a little cheesey...
Then she suggested I just change the name of my website. Which led to a long boring explanation of domain names and how I've already sent TeriAnne not Teriann to Entangled, and...yeah, she tuned me out, too.

But then Thelma (I'm Louise. Or vice versa. Anyway, Jessica Lemmon, with whom I'm travelling, in a convertible, to RT), suggested that I buy that name and redirect it to the right spelled one.

*Sigh*

Okay, let's make that sixty times more $ than the advance sixty-one times more...

 

 

We'll be Comin' Around With Swag, When we Come...

Sorry for the title. Long day.

They Seymour Agency is hosting a Shooting Stars Author Gala at the Romantic Times convention next week, and me, myself, and I are (am?) hosting a table. There are going to be all kinds of fun things going on...games, prizes, alcohol, chocolate, and probably a free book or six.

Each author is bringing a goody basket to award to some lucky attendee, and since my book is so far off  that I don't have a cover yet, my theme is going to be "How I got here." Aptly titled, "

Results Not Typical: 
The Teri Anne Stanley guide to starting a novel, selling it, signing with an agent, (and gaining an extra ten pounds) and THEN finishing that novel, in ninety days or less. 

I'll probably post the whole clever little thingy I wrote to go with it here eventually, but for now, here's a picture:

Yeah, I know you can't really see what's there...I think maybe I over-emphasized the labels, relative to the actual "stuff". But they're so CLEVER. Let me tell you some of what's in it:

A gift certificate for a workshop from Savvy Authors

A bottle of some sort of liquid that may or may not contain alcohol

Lots of little notebooks so you never have an excuse to not write down your thoughts. 

An official TeriAnneStanley coffee mug (can I just tell you how much I love free stuff from Vista Print?)

Some do-hickeys and thing-a-majigs (AKA swag--you know, like bookmarks and stuff)

Some official NaNoWriMo pencils. 

And some other cool stuff. You'll just have to stop by, if you can, and check it out!

Meanwhile, I've also been putting together stuff that I hope people will at least look at before they throw it out. And heck. Even if it gets pitched and no one remembers my name? At least I had something to work on this week so that I don't chew off my fingernails in anticipation of this trip! 

Behold: Teri Anne Stanley Book Thongs!

What are book thongs? They're pretty book marks made of ribbons and beads. And I made them. My favorite daughter helped. 

I've also got buttons coming. They're fun and clever, too, but I'm not showing them to you yet, because, you know, I don't actually have them in hand. 

Okay, back to Camp NaNoWriMo!