PENS not PEN_S

I went to a great program this weekend at the Woodford County Public Library, which is just outside of Lexington. It's called PENS on Fire (even though everyone, including the Favorite Daughter misread the title of the program).

Anyway.

There were seven romance writers there, and they shared a little about their books, and their publishing experiences, and their writing process, and then there was a book signing.  It was especially cool, because I got to meet one of my very first Twitter friends in person...the most amazing Tiffany Reisz, who writes some seriously "0_0" stuff. And writes it very well, I might add.

So that was very cool. We got to sit down and chat a bit before the program started, and she was just as nice in person as she is online.

There was quite a variety of romance presented...the first writer who spoke was  Hallee Bridgeman , who writes inspirational romance (though she pointed out that it's not your Amish love story...because real Come to Jesus stuff isn't usually pretty).  I was interested to talk to her because something she does besides write and raise kids, is make everything her family eats from scratch. We're talking grind-the-wheat scratch.

She's the Anti-Teri Anne. When my kids were little, I wrote a recipe column called The Three Ingredient Gourmet for a small magazine (that, yes, my mother edited, but whatever. It was an outlet). I was almost syndicated as a counterpoint to the Amish Cook, but that's another post. The point is, my family is all about the processed cheese food.  Although, in my defense, if the zombie apolcalypse comes and we have to start over from the basics, I can spin wool, and knit it into socks and sweaters, as my contribution to society.

 I was interested to see what Hallee and Tiffany might have to say to each other, given the opposite ends of their writing spectra, but then...Halle writes "edgy" Christian romance, and Tiffany's chief kink-meister is a Catholic priest. And Halle's written some cookbooks...the first one being "Fifty Shades of Gravy." The next one is "Walking Bread." So.

THEN I met Robyn Peterman, who is also very awesome. She's just published her first book, "How Hard Can It Be?", which I just downloaded. We made plans to meet up at RT, which I'm looking forward to.  She's hilarious in person, so I can't wait to read her book.

I met Robyn because my friend Marilyn knows her (and I keep forgetting to ask how they know each other, not that it matters, but still.  I like to have my family tree well-organized).

AND there were four other very interesting women there, but I'll have to blog about that later,  because I'm out of time.

Anyway.

It was a really fun program, and I came home highly motivated to get some more writing done, and to start thinking about branding myself.  Not, you know, with hot metal on my skin.  More like coming up with some sort of clever little logo kind of branding.

Okay, that is all. I have to go make science happen. What did YOU do last weekend?