More Reports

It's getting late in the day, and I still have a lot I need to get done, but I think I've actually been working most of the time and not goofing off. I'm not sure what I have to show for it, but I have been working. I haven't even checked the Television Without Pity boards to discuss the season finale of House.

More impressions from the RT convention ...

I took a belly dancing class that was a lot of fun. I just had a little problem with the shimmy because I've been taking ballet lately, which requires you to keep everything tight and held in, but to shimmy you've got to relax and let everything go. I may look into exploring that further as a hobby. It would be a fun line to add to an author bio. Hey, I could even make booksignings more fun by doing a belly dance first to draw in a crowd. Not that it has anything to do with my books (Katie doesn't dance -- something she likes to make very clear), but you gotta have a gimmick. Maybe I could be a belly dancing fairy.

Speaking of which ... for the fairy ball on Friday night, I dressed as the fairy on the cover of Once Upon Stilettos, with a little black dress, the red shoes and a pair of the lamest fairy wings ever made. I'd found directions online about how to make the wing shapes out of wire and then pull the legs of queen-size pantyhose over them, but I got the wrong kind of wire that didn't hold its shape with the pantyhose over it. That meant I had to get out a needle and thread and sew the cut-apart pantyhose over the wing shape, and when you're doing all that sewing in one afternoon, you don't make huge wings. My agent took a picture, so when she posts the picture, I'll post a link.

I sold out of books within an hour and a half of the bookfair starting (it was supposed to be four and a half hours long). That sounds really cool, but I only had nine copies of each book. Apparently, the bookseller running the bookfair didn't quite realize the appeal of books involving the paranormal because it seemed like every author who wrote books with fantasy or science fiction elements had only a few books that went quickly. It would have been fun to see how many books I could have sold if I'd had enough books to last until the bookfair ended. As it was, I sat there and passed out bookmarks while trying to make it sound like my books were in such high demand that they'd sold out in a heartbeat.

After all the talk about the cover models, which was supposed to be one of the big appeals of this convention, I was rather disappointed. Most of them were really short (and I'm not particularly tall, myself), many of them didn't have spectacular bodies, most of them didn't have spectacular faces, and a few of them were a bit on the swishy side (if you know what I mean). The one I found most appealing wasn't a pro model. He was the son of an author, and his mom made him compete to be Mr. Romance. He was tall and really quite good looking. Bright, too. He'd just finished his pre-med degree and plans to be a surgeon. If I were about fifteen years younger, I'd have been all over him. As it was, I had the strongest urge to feed him milk and cookies and protect him from all those women. I'm afraid I'm getting old.

So now I have to come up with something witty and clever to say about Enchanted, Inc. for the web site of the TV station where I'll be a guest next week, and then dream up five related health topics to write radio scripts about. But first I think I need to clean all the dead leaves and vines from around my air conditioner compressor outside so I can turn the AC on. I may have finally caved. I was going to see how long I could hold out without turning on the AC. I survived the 101-degree day in April without it. But now we've had a string of sort-of hot days, with it not getting too cool at night, and the ceiling fans and open windows aren't cutting it anymore. It finally occurred to me that this could be part of why I've been sleepy during the day. I'm not sleeping well at night, and it's muggy and heavy feeling in the afternoon. Duh!

Meanwhile, I continue my trip around the Girlfriends Cyber Circuit. I'm a guest at Megan Crane's blog today (and I need to add defending the hotness of Wesley from "Angel" there to my to-do list), as well as Karin Gillespie's blog. You may learn a thing or two about me from their interviews.