What I did last weekend: Put my heart in a book

Last weekend I attended the Put Your Heart in a Book conference organized by the awesome New Jersey RWA chapter. What a wonderful time! (Kudos to Ruth Seitelman, aka Ruth A. Casie, and her team for putting together such a fab weekend.)

I got to hang out with (Name-Dropper Alert!): Sabrina Jeffries, Heather Graham, Bob Mayer, Mary Jo Putney, K.A. Mitchell and Susan Wiggs (though Susan might not have realized she was hanging out with me during the Saturday luncheon). I managed to miss harassing … I mean, hanging out with Jim and Nikoo McGoldrick, though I heard from more than one attendee that they were a ton of fun. I even got to talk to e-book-phenom-soon-to-be-Berkley-phenom Marie Force, before she vanished for the rest of the weekend. Or maybe she was avoiding me. It could happen.

While I was hanging out with all these fun folks, I dragged them to my hotel room, where I had my way with them in front of a video camera. Interviewing them, of course.

On Friday night, the New Jersey chapter handed out its prestigious Golden Leaf awards for published and unpublished romance authors. Winners included such previous visitors to HEA as Hope Ramsay, Sally MacKenzie and Maria V. Snyder. I did a lot of cheering, as you can imagine.

More name-dropping: During a Saturday afternoon booksigning event, I sat right across from Mary Jo Putney and Jennifer Probst and right down the row from Jade Lee. I'm thinking "L" is a pretty good place to be in the alphabet for these events.

Here's to next year in New Jersey!