New Jersey Conference

Tanya Goodwin and me taking a swim after a hectic day of workshops and pitching our books!

This past weekend, I attended the “New Jersey Put Your Heart in a Book”. A new conference in a different state...perfect! There were, however, a few obstacles to get over before the conference officially began.

Tanya picked me up on Thursday morning. After a quick lunch at my house, we were off. We quickly settled into our rooms. Next it was time to meet Tanya for dinner. We planned on looking through the workshop schedule, but it didn’t turn out that way.

Now you know the weekend was not going to go by without a couple of incidents. Like…a brief plumbing problem. Now you must be saying it is impossible, especially after our Washington story, but it’s true. After finding out that Tanya had the only toilet in the hotel that had a tank in a tank element, which of course kept getting clogged with just a fragment of a toilet tissue, she was moved to another room. Our journey began.

Next came a simple request. A small table. Well, after dinner, we were pleasantly surprised to see that the table was delivered to Tanya’s room. A banquet table. So our journey continued. We both brought the table down the hall, onto the elevator, with Tanya hanging over it to push the elevator button. Oh yes, another wonderful scene. You just can’t make this stuff up. And let’s not forget another false fire alarm. What’s going on? Two conferences, and two false fire alarms causing chaos. I just rolled over and said who cares.

Wow. Once we got over those obstacles, we were in the home stretch.
We breezed through registration and met up with Carolyn Gibbs, Lis Eng and Cathy Greenfeder for lunch. Everything was going well until I wound up with a sore throat and fever. But that didn’t stop me. I was off to the workshops. First up was “How to Cook up a Suspense Novel” with the husband and wife team of Jim & Nikoo McGoldrick writing as Jan Coffey. From there I strolled to Kathy Kulig’s “Screenwriting Tips for Building a Novel”. Oh yes, dialog is the most important ingredient.

The Golden Leaf Book Award Ceremony was awesome. Our very own Anna DePalo won for her short contemporary novels “The Billionaire in Penthouse B”.

The rest of the conference was filled with parties (the blender) and socializing with friends, new and old. Former member Irene Weissman rocked the house, telling us countless stories of inspiration.

We rocked the house at the after party singing Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York. We had a great time. I was proud to be there representing our New York Chapter. I left with renewed hope, dreams and inspiration.