I have a lovely few days planned, and it all starts tonight! Tonight is the meet up we have organised for the online book community! I get to meet some lovely people I've been talking too online, some times for years. I've met people in the real world through book clubs, signings and writing groups, but that isn’t quite the same as 30 odd bookish people chatting over cocktails at a bar LOL There is an impromptu book swap, so if you have any books you wish to offload, please feel free to bring them along! I was distracted by the internet last night and forgot that I was going to do a cull around the edges of my collection *blushes* Anyway, if you plan on coming, you will need to RSVP, and if you wish to watch for updates, please follow me on twitter on @obsidiantears83. I should be turning up some time between 6pm and 6:30pm, so I shall see you there! If in doubt, look for the people with books! (It takes a special breed to take a book or three into a bar LOL)
This weekend is ARRC, or the Australian Romance Readers Convention. I couldn’t afford to go for the entire weekend (it kicks off with drinks tomorrow night) but I will be attending for the Awards Dinner on Saturday night and the Sunday sessions. For all the goss, follow me on twitter, or follow the #ARRC2011 hashtag!
I really wanted to attend the morning session on Saturday. Lexxie Couper, Nalini Singh, Maggie Nash and Rhian Cahill talk about Paranormal Romance and why it is “so damn seductive”. It would have been interesting. Instead, I decided to attend the Sunday sessions (I could only afford the one day) and am really looking forward to the session with reader Kate Cuthbert (@katydidinoz) and writers Nalini Singh, Keri Arthur, Denise Rossetti, Erica Hayes and Karen Simpson Nikakis. It is entitled Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Futuristic Romance: Our world, otherworlds – romance in the realms of the imagination. Looks interesting!
I do have the problem of where to sit for the dinner. You get to choose your tables Saturday morning, but I won’t be there until the Awards Dinner later that night. I am at a friend’s Divorce High Tea (definitely worth celebrating!) most of the day, voting in the morning (why is the election the same weekend as ARRC?!), and live too far away to pop in to write my name on the seating plan *sigh* We talking about having a twitter table (two actually) but I am not sure if we are going ahead with that. My friend Maria is attending for the first time too, but she only knows our book club members attending There are four of us, so Maria and I wanted to sit together. I know a number of people in the community now, and will know more after tonight’s drinks, but that isn’t the same as a close friend to hang with. If we don’t have a twitter table, I am thinking of asking one of my other friends to pencil us down for the same table. But at the same time, I like the idea of bonding over books with a random set of people I would not have normally talked to. I don’t know. I guess I’ll bring it up at the meet up tonight.
Have you attended readers or writers conventions before? I don’t mean cons like Supernova or Dragon*Con, but more serious affairs where the focus is on the books, the authors and the writing rather than cosplay and actors? I haven’t! This should be interesting!!
If you are attending either our meet up tonight, or ARRC this weekend, I hope to see there. Come and introduce yourself if we haven’t already met! I’ll be the one wearing a lot of black and with a pink* stripe in my hair LOL
*Oh yes, the pink! The red faded, the lovely metallic magenta faded, and now it is a rose colour… I hate pink! But I guess this colour isn’t too bad LOL
“I don’t think it would be like that. I think it’d be more like they’d put you in a terrarium in a laboratory to study you. And everybody’d be tearing up their baseboards looking for more of you.” She paused for a moment before adding, “Do you have, like, a house back there?”
