By Diane Whiteside

(From the January 2006 issue of the Update.)

A few months ago, Karen Anders, Leanne Banks, Meredith Bond, Glenda Garland, and I got together for a Meet the Writers panel at Barnes & Noble in Fairfax, Virginia.  After a rainy week, we were looking forward to an evening in a warm, friendly place with lots of books and hopefully, reasonable questions.

To our great joy, we found the B&N “CRMs” (the folks who arrange these gatherings) very pleased to see us.  They’d set up a table and chairs in the middle of the cooking section.  (We were very careful to keep our backs to the cakes and candies cookbooks and our faces toward the health & fitness section.  This had the added benefit of letting us view the cover models [mostly male] on the diet & exercise books—strictly for research purposes, of course!) A table in front of us proved perfect for the usual offerings of bookmarks, cover art and chocolates.  (Meredith Bond had brought dark chocolate kisses!)

Soon a few aspiring writers arrived, and we were off and running. One of them had been published before and wanted to know how to get back into the game.  The other one was desperate to become a published romance author.  Between the two of them, they had a million questions, and they kept us hopping.

They also insisted that we use The Dreaded Black Microphone.  So we passed it back and forth, handling it very carefully as if it might explode at any time, or deposit ten thousand calories on the unsuspecting, trying to answer all the questions.

We were apparently successful because at first people watched us from the back, then others watched from the side, and finally started sitting down and joining in.  Leanne is as spectacularly witty as her books.  Meredith is warm and loving, while Glenda spoke cogently and brilliantly about mystery, science fiction AND romance.  Karen has been a good friend for years at both writing and my day job.  She was always the voice of common sense.

Afterward, the wonderful CRM asked us to autograph stock so they could sell it later.  Bless her heart; she said the books would “go like hotcakes.” I thought she was going to be smothered by five adoring authors.  Then she asked us if we thought we could sign more than the three or four copies each we’d been told to expect.  We all assured her we were certain we could (duh!), unlimbered our pens, and set happily to work.

Finally, I drove home, got myself a good stiff cup of tea, and purred happily. It was a very nice end to the week.

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Diane Whiteside, a WRW member, is the author of two historical novels and a novella for Brava, a contemporary erotic novel (The Switch, January 2006, Berkley), and The Hunter’s Prey, a compilation of interrelated erotic vignettes that includes the prequel for Bond Of Blood (October, 2006), the first of her Texas Vampires Trilogy.  Also on the horizon is the futuristically erotic Captive Dreams (written with Angela Knight, Berkley, September 2006) and The Southern Devil (Brava, September 2006), another western for Brava.