I need to send out a special thanks to Stella Price, who patiently answered every single question I asked her about RT…and probably about 5 times each because I kept either forgetting what she told me or loosing the paper I’d written it on. I also need to send out a special thanks to Adra Steia/Ash Rowland, who shared my frantic text messages in the month leading up to RT. Seriously, she deserves some props because I was sending out things like “only 15 days left! Totally freakin’ dude! Totally…” and five minutes later it was “omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg…” They both deserve some serious props for putting up with me. And last but not least, I need to thank Kayleigh Jamison, Stella and Adra for not leaving me to deal with my own mess while I constantly changed the room reservations. I’ll explain later.
I need to bow down and worship Cara North for giving me the opportunity to represent Tease Publishing, LLC. It was such an honor!
Let’s get down to business, shall we? Here are my suggestions, based on my RT Virgin experience.
1. This one is in three parts:
Don’t make reservations for more than yourself and maybe one friend.
Don’t try to save money by staying at another hotel, no matter how “close” it might be to the actual convention or how cheap the price might be.
Don’t make reservations too early.
I made several mistakes here. I made reservations at the Doubletree Hotel in August of 2008. I reserved 3 rooms for 4 nights, 4/23-4/26, thinking we wouldn’t be there the first night of the convention. I was wrong. Since I was representing Tease as an editor, I needed to be there the first night, 4/22, and I couldn’t add an extra day to my existing reservation, and by the time I discovered this, it was November and they didn’t have any space for extra reservations. So I made a reservation at the Holiday Inn, which I didn’t know was literally right next-door to the Doubletree, for 4/22 for 2 rooms.
I thought, hey, I can’t be the only person who wants to save money. Everyone will want in on this deal! Well, I was wrong. Most people already knew what I had to learn. So I had to make sure that I had people to share the hotel rooms so I wasn’t left paying for all three. I literally stressed over this ALL YEAR LONG! Stella was my connection to anyone who might be going to RT, so I must have bugged her at least once per week about who was going, who wasn’t going and did we need to change the reservations again? She handled me as best she could, but every time I thought about those hotel rooms, I swear I had a mini panic-attack! Then, about a month before RT, I found out that two of our group couldn’t come. That means I needed to decrease our reservations. Well, the Doubletree said I couldn’t change anything, all I could do was cancel. There was no way I could ask my friends to suck-up the cost of the extra room, and I certainly couldn’t do it. So I canceled those reservations and made another reservation at the Holiday Inn for the 4/23-4/26, but I only got it for one room, because I’m a stressed-out moron and thought we’d be ok with 4 people in one room. Stella, thankfully, convinced me otherwise, so I canceled THOSE reservations and got another one for the same time period but for 2 rooms instead. The reservations were fabulously cheap! Literally a FRACTION of the cost we would have paid for the Doubletree. It worked out to about $125 per person for 5 days. So I was feeling like a thrifty bargain shopper, but in the meantime, I had dealt with 9 months of stress over hotel reservations AND transferred that stress to my friends. And in the end, it was all for nothing. We showed up and got a good look at the Holiday Inn…and were NOT impressed. For the price we paid, we weren’t expecting anything like the Four Seasons, but we didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was. The rooms were humid for no reason we could figure out and the air conditioners didn’t help with that. There was mold EVERYWHERE! It was in the light fixtures, inside the picture frames…everywhere! We had trouble getting into our rooms almost every day, until the building engineer finally advised us that we were pushing the lever-based door handle down in stead of up. Now seriously, who the hell sees a door lever and pushes it UP instead of DOWN?!?! And it took the man 3 days to actually tell us that! It was awful! On top of that, getting to and from the convention was literally a pain in the ass. It wasn’t far and if I didn’t have such a horrible sense of direction, it wouldn’t have been confusing, but the convention itself is fast-paced and it meant leaving to go take a shower before the nights’ events was either really intrusive to the schedule or just flat-out impossible. Also, parking at the Wyndham was a nightmare! It’s not a multi-floor hotel. Nothing on the property is more than 2 stories high and they have over 1,000 rooms, so it’s spread out over a large area of land. You had to walk forever to get to anything. It was a serious workout just to get to the pool bar. And all of that walking was done outside. The grounds were gorgeous, but all that walking made you sweaty. So having an hour or two to take a shower and get ready for the balls at night was essential. But after walking around all day long all over the place, we either had to miss something to get back to the hotel or just forego the shower completely. So literally, staying at a hotel other than the one the convention was in was nothing more than a giant inconvenience. By the end I was wishing I had forked out the extra money to stay at the Wyndham, just so I might have had a chance to rest in my room before events and maybe take a shower...it would have been worth the extra cash.
2. Take the time to read over the schedule of events they hand you when you check-in at the convention.
I thought I was too busy to do so. I checked in and then ran to our hotel. Because the reservations were in my name, I had to make sure I checked in so that when everyone else got there, they’d be able to actually dump their stuff in the rooms before heading over to the convention. I took the bag they gave me when I checked-in and just left it at the hotel, never even opened it until maybe the 3rd day. They had a schedule of events complete with the rooms they were in…and because I didn’t read it, I felt kinda lost the whole time I was there. I was either just following along behind other people or frantically trying to figure out where the seminar I wanted to attend was located. When I checked in, I saw people lounging around the Wyndham going through their goody bags, and wrote it off as they just didn’t have anything better to do. I was SO WRONG! LOL!
3. Don’t try to haul too much around with you.
I filled my trusty back-pack with all the things I thought essential. Including make-up, nutra-grain bars, bottled water and my laptop, along with quite a few other things. I thought this was very important, but within the first hour I was dying from the sheer weight of the bag. Laptops are heavier than you think and in the end, I didn’t even get to use mine. People took time to stop and maybe blog a little. They were all over the lobby, trying to take advantage of the Wi-Fi (which I heard only worked half the time), but they never took long and I imagine most were in the same predicament I was in lugging that weight around. Don’t get me wrong. It’s worth it to carry a bag around, even if you’re staying in the convention hotel, to gather the swag you get at practically every event and seminar, but a simple shoulder bag would be fine and in fact most people just used the bag they got at check-in and it was perfect. Just be prepared to REALLY downsize what you think of as “essential”. Because trust me, after hauling it around all day, you’ll change your mind.
4. Don’t waste time being shy or nervous.
I am not an out-going people person. Well, not in-person anyway. Not normally. In fact, without my meds, I have a serious issue with crowds. But I had my medicine which made me feel ready to deal. It wasn’t as crowded this year as it was in past years, so there wasn’t the HUGE crowds I was expecting to deal with. But...I still spent the first day firmly attached to my friends like a love-sick puppy. I was DYING to meet everyone around me, but I was so nervous…and it showed. The first day we were there, we manned the publisher table, which we decked out with Tease and author swag and handed out to everyone who came by. I got a little distressed because people were looking at me like I was some sort of gargoyle hovering over the table. It took me a while to realize that my stress and uncertainty was showing. This made me even more self-conscious and I took to hiding behind my friends and letting them do all the public hand pumping and meeting and greeting. I felt lost and left out, but I didn’t know how to change it. That feeling didn’t leave me. It stuck with me even to the ball that night, the EC Jungle themed ball. First, we went back to the hotel to shower and change and were late getting to the ball, which meant we didn’t get a table or dinner and had to stand. That sucked. Stupid me, I wore my pretty shoes and took them off almost immediately. Literally, I walked out of our hotel wearing them and by the time we got out of the car at the Wyndham, I had decided that I had been on my feet all day and they hurt like hell and there was NO WAY I was going to wear my pretty shoes (which naturally kill my feet) for one more second. I walked across the parking lot barefoot and stayed that way for the rest of the night. I did take a picture of my pretty shoes, sitting on the table…where they stayed all night long. We got into the ball, found a cocktail table with no chairs to gather around and then we just kinda stayed there. Stella and Adra knew people so they were mingling, but Kayleigh and I didn’t know anyone and we stuck to the table. In fact, the first new RT friend I made had to actually come up to me to make my acquaintance. That was Stacy Loucks, who is the most awesome person and now someone I can’t imagine NOT knowing! It took meeting her and realizing that I had wasted a whole day being nervous to break me out of my shell. The other 4 days I didn’t waste anymore time. I introduced myself to just about everyone who crossed my path. I got cards and email addresses like you wouldn’t believe! In fact, I still have a pile of them on my desk. I need to go through them and send out emails…which I will do as soon as I’m done writing this.
5. Don’t over-think your costumes.
I was seriously worried about them and in the end, it didn’t matter what you wore. There were a few people who dressed to the 9’s for the costume contests, but for the most part, people just wore whatever they wanted. There were people wearing jeans and people wearing full-on ball gowns. After all, where else are you going to wear them if you have them? Just go to have fun, wear what you want and leave the stress at home.
6. Do be prepared to wait in line…a lot. In fact try to be 30 minutes early to just about everything.
There might not have been as many people there this year as in past years, but it still paid to be the first in line for stuff. Didn’t matter what you were lining up for, the first people in line got the best, whether it be seats, a view or swag. It paid to be early.
7. Don’t be afraid of the cover models. But don’t attack them either.
I’d heard all the horror stories, about the cads who mauled women and were total assholes, thinking they could do whatever they wanted and we’d worship the ground they walked on. Based on other people’s opinions, I didn’t even dare approach any of them until Friday. For one thing, having that many gorgeous men wandering around acting like they wanted to know me was intimidating to me. I mean seriously, in my normal every-day life, I don’t even get within a mile of guys like that and here they were shaking hands and flirting with everyone. It made me nervous and self-conscious all over again as well as initially given credence to the horror stories. But it wasn’t until Friday night, attending Deidre Knight’s Spartan party that I actually got to meet my first one. And it happened pretty much against my will. I was sitting in the back with Kayliegh and Stacy, cringing while watching the game of musical laps that was going on in the front of the room. Stella and Adra were mingling with all the other authors and readers, and we were just…witnessing, which was about all we had the energy to do by that point as it was around 1 or 2 am. Franco D’Angelo came over to us. Kay and I were immediately on our guard, but Stacy, who had met him on Wednesday night, was totally relaxed and friendly. He responded to Kayliegh and I the way we responded to him, but he was friendly to Stacy. It took me all of 2 minutes to figure out that he was probably almost as guarded of us as we were of him. I relaxed, he relaxed. It was so elementary! I felt so dumb for taking the preconceived notions I had so seriously! Don’t get me wrong. The experiences and opinions of others are important information. But just because they had a bad experience, or in most cases, knew someone who knew someone who had a bad experience, doesn’t mean you will too. And, to be quite honest, think of what they have to do. They have to campaign for your vote. Some of them might take things a little too far…and yes I met some like that, but not all of them are smarmy bastards. Some of them are just people…and pretty cool, laid-back people at that. Almost all of them walk into the competition not knowing ANYONE there, and whether they are people-oriented or not, their job is to make you want to vote for them. This year’s Mr. Romance, Charles Paz, won by being sexy, which took no effort on his part, and personable without being slimy about it, which is where the effort came in. I got an interview with him and you should read it. He’s just a guy…like any other guy. He’s a little shy, but totally willing to introduce himself to anyone, no matter the risk he runs of getting totally shut-down, which actually happened, unfortunately. There are many women who walk into the convention on the defensive. The common understanding is to assume these men are disgusting and smarmy until they prove otherwise, and that’s assuming you even give them the chance. On the other hand, there are the women who seem to attend assuming it’s their right to paw these men as much as they want and demand whatever they want of them, all in the name of earning their vote. Some of the guys are willing to go to any extent, and it shows. Some are constantly on the defensive, which also shows. My advice, for what it’s worth, is to let them approach you, don’t take anything they say too seriously or personally, and just enjoy getting to know yet another new person at RT. It’s all in good fun and these men are there to advance their careers just like any other author or publisher. Just let them do their jobs and you’ll have the advantage of getting to spend time with men more handsome than what you might be used to. After all, who DOESN’T love some good eye-candy? LOL!
8. Don’t be afraid to attend seminars you might not initially think would interest you.
I signed up to attend a private photo shoot for a cover despite the fact that at that point I’d heard that you didn’t want to be within ten feet of a cover model and covers aren’t really my thing as I’m not a published author and have no real plans to change that. I don’t really know why I signed up for it. I just did. And I’m SO glad I did! It worked out that when this particular event happened, most of my friends where either occupied or resting, but by this time I’d missed most of the seminars I’d actually wanted to attend and didn’t want to waste my last two days by ditching yet another event, another chance to experience new things. So I went and learned a LOT! It was really fascinating! There was a voyeuristic feel for the bedroom scenes, but the cover-models were amazingly professional about it once the shot was done and they just moved on to the next shot. Plus, I got to spend some time with some of the other people I met at RT while I was there and it was nice to just experience it all. Everyone involved, from the photographer to the models, was TOTALLY nice and willing to answer any question. And I do mean ANY question, because some of them got a little personal. They were there to de-mystify the photo shoot and it worked.
9. Visit promo row once per day.
I went a little overboard, trying to fit in as much as possible to every day. This led to me taking one MASSIVE trip down promo row, gathering at least one thing from every author/spot. Stella advised me later that they put different stuff out every day, sometimes more often than that, and they always save the best for the last day. So I walked away with two bags full of business cards, bookmarks and other goodies, but I could have gotten more. Promo row is your chance to get introduced to authors you might not know of, or might not consider picking up under normal circumstances. Not to mention, getting stuff for free just flat-out rocks! LOL!
10. No matter what anyone says, don’t drink too much.
As a single mother, I don’t get to go out much anymore. As a result, I don’t drink nearly as much as I used to, so I’m a light-weight now. I had heard that everyone gets drunk at the Vampire ball, so even though Stella and Adra told me they weren’t going to get smashed and maybe I shouldn’t either, I was determined to get drunk. I wanted to experience everything remember? Well I did and I don’t think I’ve regretted anything so much the next morning. The one thing I didn’t think about was that I’m not 21 anymore. Hangovers freakin’ HURT now. I totally understood the drive to get smashed at the vamp ball. The entertainment is…wow. Heather Graham hosted what is apparently her yearly campy B-grade horror movie/musical. She’s actually an excellent singer and so is everyone else in her family (that woman is like the mafia-don of the romance world. She has a gazillion relatives and they all seem to be strategically placed and insanely talented. It’s scary. Much respect to ya Ms. Graham!) The entertainment was exactly as it was intended to be, more amusing than anything else. But it IS as long as everyone says it is and let’s face it, by 10pm after a long day, your attention span is pretty much shot. So getting drunk was an excellent distraction. I didn’t do anything truly embarrassing, like hit on anyone or try to sing…but that hangover sucked in more ways than I care to think about. I drank my quota for the year. I won’t be doing that next year. I’m too old for that kind of drinking and I missed a full half of the next day, trying to convince myself that I was not dying long enough to get out of bed and get back to the Wyndham. Besides, the drinks were astronomically expensive and watered down by a ton of ice. So it cost me a small fortune just to get drunk, just to have a horrid hangover from hell the next day, just to miss out on more RT experiences. Definitely not doing that again.
Well, there they are, my suggestions for RT Virgins and more experienced RT attendees. Other than all of that, I got a huge pile of free books and bought a few at the book fair. I met a ton of people and had a blast. In fact, I’m still riding a wave of euphoria from it all. It was so much fun! RT is without a doubt the most expensive convention in our industry, but I think everyone should go at least once in their lifetime. It’s an experience you don’t want to miss! And I sincerely hope to see all of you there next year!
Now, weren't my shoes pretty? LOL!
Kisses, Hugs and Spanx,
Luci
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