I’m here in sunny Anaheim, CA after my first day of classes and a wonderful lunch. Highlights so far:

• A nice long walk in the early AM today with the lovely Sandra Bunino wherein we overshot our turn and ended up walking at least 50% longer than we’d planned. And here she is at last night’s Literacy event:

• A wonderful workshop on Deep POV with Karen Witemeyer (absolutely outstanding!)
• “From Sweet to Scorching: Writing Intimacy…” with a panel that included Roni Loren, Susan Mallory, Shana Galen, Deeanne Gist, Sophie Jordan and moderated by Tiffany Reisz,
• “Voice lessons: How to Pinpoint and develop your voice with Liz Talley and Darynda Jones
• Lunch with keynote speaker Stephanie Laurens (and a great teaser about an in process documentary about romance writers.) Listening to Stephanie choke up about all the changes in the biz made me tear up too. The industry IS changing and while it’s scary for the likes of brick and mortar retailers and even some publishers, “there has never been a better time to be an author.” Amen to that!
• A session on writing dialogue with Julia Quinn (sigh…one of my favorites).

Oh, and look at the goodies I got just by claiming my registration tote bag:

I’ll probably have a giveaway for some of these books as I ended up with duplicates of Julia Quinn’s, Robyn Carr’s and Meg Cabot’s books and just way more books overall than I can handle. Stay tuned for that after I return.

I hope to meet up with the illustrious Hilary Jacques / Regan Summers tonight, but for sure by lunch tomorrow. There’s a TON of people here. Finding any one person is like searching out a specific stone on a gravel road. Oy! Thank goodness for cell phones and Twitter and email.

So…more RWA goodness to come in the days ahead. Lots of learnin’ goin’ on here!