I’m sure many of you have heard more than you can stand about RWA’s recent national conference. You’ve read the serious business discussions, reminisced about gatherings gone-by, and of course, celebrated the Harlequin ball where I threw out my hip doing the Time Warp. But don’t be afraid! What follows is NOT a serious discussion of market trends. Neither is it a lengthy discussion of my hip injury that is now much better, thank you. Nor will I rhapsodize about Harlequin’s offering of chocolate or how unexpectedly nervous I was to sit next to Brenda Chin at the Blaze lunch. (She’s wonderful, by the way, and I don’t know what my problem was.) No…what follows is…well, a story about how terrible my friends and I are, and how one must be very careful about “market trends.”

I’m not just a Blaze author. I also write for Dorchester books in their Leisure and Love Spell imprints. My editor is Chris Keeslar, who is young (well, younger than me), cute, and really, really easy to tease. It has become kinda of a thing for Dorchester authors to show up at the “Spotlight on Dorchester” workshop, wave happily when our books are mentioned, and quietly harass Chris however possible. How, you say, do you harass your editor “quietly”? Well, we tease him after the workshop for not mentioning our books a dozen or more times. We tell him we will never forgive him for not saying that all manuscript submissions must include the words: I have read ALL of Jade Lee’s books and I love them! And finally, we make funny faces at him when he’s trying to be serious. Yes, we are cruel, but he’s used to us.

Now I must say that I was NOT at this year’s spotlight. I did NOT hear the forthcoming exchange. But I DID participate in seeing that the harassment continued. Mostly by posting all about it on this blog.

During the workshop, Chris was talking about fantasy romance. (Hopefully, he mentioned DRAGONBORN and DRAGONBOUND by Jade Lee). He mentioned that he had not seen any unicorn books lately. This was not a request for more unicorn books, just a comment. However, a fabulous author decided this was a perfect time to tease Chris. Cindy Holby (Prism winner for TWIST) tweeted the urgent news that Chris Keeslar was DESPERATE for unicorn manuscripts. It was a joke. It was, however, picked up within moments by the Twitter community.

Not ten feet outside of the workshop, Chris was stopped by the first person to offer him a unicorn manuscript. She had heard that he was desperately looking for them. Cindy Holby was right there and burst out laughing because, as you all know, Chris’ in-box will now be filled to the brim with unicorns. I have since offered him a unicorn manuscript of my own. Sue Grimshaw of Borders Books promised to email Chris and ask for details on this new trend in unicorns. Feel free to contact him through Dorchester’s website, facebook page, and/or Twitter. (www.dorchesterpub.com) I’m sure he feels he needs to know your unique twist on unicorns.

The funny thing is…I’m sure he’ll end up finding one. Somewhere in the piles ane piles of gleaming white horses will be a gem manuscript. Hopefully, he won’t have to wade through tons of magical fluff before finding it! And…btw…THANK YOU CHRIS for being such a good sport!

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 6:30 am and is filed under Jade Lee. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.