San Francisco, Part Two

So, the conference ended. I had a great time, but I was out of my cowboy boots (#1 lesson learned: Do not walk down 20% grade hills in cowboy boots) and into my sneakers in 2.3 seconds flat after the last handshake, and then we were pounding the pavement downhill to Chinatown.

Did I mention it was the first day of Chinese New Year? And we were in Chinatown? On a Sunday?


The Kid is getting noticeably better at getting everyone's head in the shot.

Speaking of 'shot,' man, it sounded like downtown Baghdad, what with all the firecrackers going off. Seriously, someone could have whipped out a Tommygun and taken out half a block and not one single person would have noticed the noise.

First, we ate. I made the excutive decision that any restaurant on the second floor was better than any restaurant on the first floor, and any restaurant that had a line was better than any restaurant that didn't. (This opinion has been confirmed by my Chinese ESL students.) So we ate at Kan's.



Then, for dessert, we got some fortune cookies.

No, really, I mean we went and got some fortune cookies, made by this nice lady:



The cashier tried to give my Kid one of the ones she was making. I don't know if you can see that little pile of yellow slips of paper by her left hand? Yellow means something in fortune cookie world, apparently, because she grabbed that cookie out of The Kid's hand and began to apologize: "No! NO! Not for childrens! For adults!!!" I laughed so hard I almost wet my pants. The cashier almost gave my son a dirty fortune cookie! Try to find something like that in the Midwest!



Note the blooming trees? The clear blue sky? The 65 degree temperatures? Man, I was loving life right then. And that was just one afternoon.

The next day, we did Alcatraz.



Did you know the island had been taken over by American Indians in the 1970s? I sorta did, but I know a lot more now. That's the sort of thing I like knowing, because you never know when it will pop up in a book.

The Kid, truth be told, did not enjoy most of Alcatraz, except for the models:



It was so foggy that day that we couldn't see the island (even the parts we were standing on) until the next day, when it cleared off and we were on the Golden Gate Bridge:


That's it on the left.

Oh, the Golden Gate Bridge. It was my Favorite Thing.



It was foggy enough on the north side that it still had that air of mystery to it, but clear enough we could see dolphins and seals in the water below and the city in the bay. It was beautiful. And very tall:


It made me dizzy.

We only walked about 1/3 of the way across, because The Kid was hungry and we had a date.



A date with the Pacific Ocean, that is. Man, that water was COLD. Then we walked up to Haight-Ashbury.



Haight-Ashbury, if you don't know, was the hippie center of the world in 1969. My menfolk think they're being 'cool' over there. Now, there's a Ben and Jerry's across the street. We had ice cream.

So, in conclusion, we stood beside our hearts in San Francisco:



Ate the chocolate in Ghiradelli Square:



And had Mai Tai's at the Tonga Room:



It was an awesome vacation. We saw things you don't see in the Midwest; ate things you can't get in this part of Illinois, and generally had a heck of a good time.

What? What's that you say? After at least four blogs on it, you wanna know what I wore?

Okay.


This was Friday. I've got on boots under that skirt!


This was the Gala Banquet dress Friday night. Only a few other people changed, but damn it, I bought the dress, packed the dress, and, if I may say so, looked good in the dress, so I wore it.

And that's it. Those are the only two outfit pictures we remembered to take. But have no fear! The 'professional' cowgirl look will be seen again, very soon!

How soon? VERY soon. I'm doing a radio interview for a conference at which I'm presenting in two weeks, and then, of course, the actual presentation (more on that on Tuesday)!

Stay tuned!

San Francisco, Part One

Hello, and Welcome to the inaugural Tuesday Authorial posting on the Authorial Mom blog!

(Don't panic. That was as formal as it gets around here. Tangential humor still rules.)

So, I packed up the Husband and the Kid and went to San Francisco last week. On Thursday, I'll talk more about what we did as a family on our vacation. But I didn't go just for the vacation. I went for the San Francisco Writers Conference.

Hosted by my agency, Larsen Pomada Literary Agents, the San Francisco Writers conference was at the top of Nob Hill in (surprise!) San Francisco. And when I say the top, I'm not kidding. That hill was freaking huge.

I didn't walk around it too much for a few days, though. The Mark Hopkins hotel, where the conference was held, was a beautiful place, and it was full of all sorts of people! Writer people, agent people, and even editor people! In other words, my kind of people!

Well, sort of. Most of these writer people write 'literary fiction,' which is good stuff, but tends to have fewer steamy sex scenes and greatly reduced chances of a conventional happily-ever-after ending. I write romance. I'll be honest, I was worried about getting funny looks. I don't handle confrontation well.

Turns out, I didn't need to worry. The only problem came at the session entitled "Putting Passion on the Page" with Rachelle Chase, Elizabeth Jennings, and Margaret Marbury. It was the only romance-focused session at the conference, and about half the people in the very crowded conference room were men. It was the last question of the session, and a woman asked "Yes, could you tell me what the difference between pornography and erotica is?"

That is, hands down, the worst question in the world. And about the most commonly asked one.

Rachelle, Elizabeth, and Margaret were great, though. They stuck the landing with a perfect 10. And, in case you were wondering, the answer is that pornography is a sex act. Tab A into Slot B. Nothing more, nothing less. Romance is about a relationship between two people, of which sex is a natural, emotional part. Emotion is the key word there, people. Emotional as in love. As in happily ever after.

I digress. I did get some funny looks, as in I personally found them funny. I sat between two gentlemen at the first lunch, Raymond Edge and David Shapiro. Raymond writes anthropological fiction, set in early American Indian periods, while David has an awesome natural history graphic novel aimed at middle-school boys. And the conversation went like this (in between bites of less-than-awesome salmon):

"So, what do you write?"

"New western romance."

It's not easy for one's eyebrows to shoot up and backward at the same time as one blinks slowly, but it is doable. "Well . . ." and then something interesting happened. "What does 'new western' mean?"

So I did my elevator pitch, "Where the cowboys are the Indians, but they often have cell phones, pick-up trucks, and advanced degrees."

And then something even more interesting happened. "Do you have a particular tribe in mind?" Now, it turned out that Raymond also writes about American Indians, but this was a common male-based question. I answered it six times in three days.

When I went to the Romance Writers of America conference last July, not a single person asked about the tribe. They wanted to know about hunks on horseback, which is totally fine with me. But the men want the non-romance specifics they can wrap their heads around. They want details. Real facts.

So I had a variety of interesting conversations with men (who would not be considered my typical reading audience) about the authenticity of being a white woman writing about Lakota Indians. It was weird, in a good way. I think the fact that I actually do my research (as opposed to just making stuff up, which I got the feeling people sort of expected me to do as a romance writer) earned me some writing respect.

So while I didn't feel like I was being attacked for writing romance, I did feel like I was representing the entire genre, so I better make it good. I talked to a lot of women who weren't sure if they wanted to call what they wrote 'romance' or not because of that aforementioned 'pornography' stigma.

Like Laurel Levy, who writes urban fantasy/paranormal. . . romance. I think. I haven't read her book yet (but will some time next week), but it sounded like the romance between the two main characters played a pretty major role. Or Lisa Slabach, who writes women's contemporary fiction and also has a romance sort of on the side. She's originally from Chicago, so she's cool, and by the time the conference had ended, she'd already made contact with her local chapter of RWA. Sarah Harian, who has an awesome sounding urban fantasy for young adults, was less concerned with labels, but I think that's because she's one of those 'young people' you hear about so much today who just do what they do and don't care what anyone else thinks. (I kid, Sarah!)

Look, I know that 'people' like to dismiss the entire romance genre as trashy, light-weight drivel, and, honestly, there's some stuff out there that is, in fact, trashy, light-weight drivel. But a lot of it isn't. A lot of it is good. Really good. These same 'people' also blow off other genres, like science fiction, fantasy, paranormal, horror, detective . . . pick a genre, they get dumped on. But the fact of the matter is that readers like romance, sci/fi, horror . . . all of them. Readers buy these books. Lots of these books. Romance alone counts as almost half of all books sold alone.

I'm an author. I write romance. I want to sell books.

I'm so glad we went to San Francisco. I met so many great people, plotted the next step of my journey with my agent (more on that next week), and saw a hell of a lot a great city (more on that Thursday).