Okay, I am not all that fond of the unpacking either. My husband is a restless sort who cannot rest when we come home until he is completely and utterly unpacked. Everything has to be sorted out and put back in place. I don’t know how we ended up married sometimes, because I linger over unpacking as much as I linger over the original packing.

Rochester's Belles

But what I shouldn’t be lingering over is the story:  Please let me say outright that RomCon rocked! It was bar none, the best reader’s conference I’ve ever attended. Wonderful readers, great organization (I mean, hey, whoever thought about having the authors’s schedules printed on labels and stuck to the back of our name tags was brilliant!) and fun events. My favs included the Build a Hero workshop, where we all divided up according to interests and brainstormed our perfect hero.

Working with Anna Campbell, Cynthia and Kati, we came up with Sir Rochester deVale. Yes, we were making a nudge and a nod toward that Rochester, but we had a hilarious good time poking at the conventions of the genre (his greatest fear: a lighted match), his big . . . wait for it. . . nose, (and you thought I was going to say something else) and of course, he was tall dark and handsome. What I found interesting about the whole workshop is that nearly every hero created (including ours) had a military background and was emotional scarred by some previous experience. Oh, girls, we loved our damaged heroic goods, don’t we?

The Elizabeths

The signing was a kick of a good time, including meeting so many new readers–and by that I mean, younger readers. Please don’t be insulted, but by the time you reach my age, anyone under 25 is young. Okay, anyone under 40 is young. But what made my heart go pitter-pat was all the young women who are discovering romance. Having come of age reading Harry Potter and Twilight, they are the emerging generation embracing romance with abandon and boy are they enthusiastic. Here I am with the Elizabeths. They were hilariously fun–best friends named Elizabeth and they came to meet me, the other Elizabeth. Hanging with these gals, and getting the opportunity to go out to lunch with Kati (up above) really sparked the old muse. (Truly, the old gal needed a bit of kick start.)

Why, yes that is me. The Devil's Mistress. Or DM for short.

As for the rest of the weekend, the intimate chats, the panels, and the games, ok–the Saturday night in the bar laughing over Missy the Missing Cat until I really just embarrassed myself by laughing so much–made the weekend rollicking. My cheeks hurt by Sunday.

So I hope everyone is putting RomCon on their to-do list for 2011–mark off September and plan on getting yourself to Denver. It was worth every penny. If you want to see more, I’ve uploaded a bunch of pictures on my Facebook page.

And btw, Julia Quinn is a great traveling companion. We sat together flying down and talked nonstop the entire flight, and when we discovered the free wi-fi chatted on Facebook together while sitting next to each other, which was vastly amusing to us, probably not so much to the rest of the rows around us. And on the way home, she got me upgraded with her to First Class and we again finagled seats together, but we were both so tired we just sort of sat there, each in our own tired daze–her doing Suduko and me knitting. Both of us agreed to two things: the weekend was great and we are going back next year!