Anyway, back to ApollyCon. I was so fucking nervous that I was going to have to explain who I was and what I wrote—and P.S., after having been hot shit for so many years, I don’t think this is a bad thing at all. I’ve never been a fan of ego, mine or anybody else’s, and it’s good to be humbled. It keeps you working hard. But I’m socially awkward as fuck, in spite of how outgoing J.R. Ward appears to be, and I was honestly afraid I was going to embarrass myself in front of all these youngsters who were lighting the world on fire with these romantasys.
I was tapped to be on the opening panel Wednesday night along with Jen and Nalini Singh, who is absolutely amazing. (I’d never met Nalini before, but OMG, of course I knew her!) I’ll never forget walking into the ballroom before things got rolling and seeing all the empty seats and the dais up front and picturing the next generation of readers filling the room.
As I started to get rattled, I decided, fuck it.
What the hell do I have to lose? Even if they hated me or thought I was old and irrelevant, nobody could take away my last twenty years. Nobody.
I decided to say whatever the fuck came to me and just roll with it.
Well, actually, that’s my operating principle. But I was going to be super loose because I’m an old fart and like Kathy Bates inFried Green Tomatoessaid, “I have no estrogen and full insurance.” (Paraphrasing here.)
So Liz and Jills were moderating, and after they had us intro ourselves, Liz tossed the first question to me. It was something along the lines of “Your vampires are dark, gritty and emotional, what inspired the tone of your books?”
Now, for context, this is one of my oldest and closest friends asking it. She knows the answer and then some, so I was like, “Oh fuck, Liz, come on, you can do better than that.”
Her response? In front of a thousand people?
“It’s not my question.” *indicates crowd with reading glasses* “It’stheirs.”
Talk about getting slapped in the face with a fish.
I drooped in defeat behind the table. And then I had to go on. I reinflated myself. Looked ’em dead in the eye, and said, “That is agreatquestion. I’msoglad you asked.”
The laugh was worth every ounce of horror and embarrassment.
And then I proceeded to ride Nalini with, “Thank you for coming along on this journey” for an hour and a half—until she threatened to poison me. And I insulted Jen when I announced that I’d had no interest in writing Rhage’s book (he’s her book boyfriend and you’d swear I’d offended her personally when I dropped that littlebon mot). I made a total ass of myself, and it was the single best panel I’d ever been on.
Cue the next day.
I’d agreed to be on the Gallery panel with a couple of writers I wasn’t familiar with. It was hosted by Carrie Feron, who I love, but I have to admit, I wasn’t all that excited. She’d said she was going to moderate and ask us questions, and I gotta be honest. That’s just grueling for me. I have to stand up and move when I’m in front of a crowd, and my favorite thing to do with any group of people is make them laugh, and both are hard when you’re trapped in a seat behind a table with a static mic plugged in front of you.
When I arrived at the location of the panel, I was confused because there was a shit ton of people choking the hallway. Like a hundred of them. While I was looking around, someone said, “They’re here for you.”
I looked over my shoulder, thinking somebody else had shown up and they were talking to them.
Turned out, clips of me being an idiot on stage the night before had hit TikTok. And I think people wanted to see what else I’d proverbially burn down.
I was in a daze when the doors opened, and people filed into what was already a pretty full room. Then Carrie took me aside and said, “You know, what. I think I’m going to do introductions and then just give you the mic.”
Thankfuck, I thought.
Out loud, I was like, “I will not let you down. I’ll make sure it’s fun.”
Yeah, well, I had no fucking clue what the fucking panel was about.
Monster romance.
Holyfuck. For a cutup like me, you couldn’t have given me better material on a silver platter. Three questions in and we were talking about how long sixteen inches was (a milk carton, as it turns out) and two-dick creatures (which caused me to ask Emma Hamm “How many dicks do you need in a character?” at which one person in the back yelled out, “All of them!”) when I realized I was in way over my head. I mean, we talked about how to have sex with a centaur (now there was aGrey’s Anatomylesson) and inter-species fucking (when I started writing paranormal, I was warned if I ever did a shifter, I had to make sure that each party had the same number of feet on the ground. Four with four was okay, and two with two was okay, but you couldn’t do a four and a two in a love scene).
Halfway through, I was so gobsmacked that I announced, “You know, I never thought I’d see the Black Dagger Brotherhood be the literary equivalent of the missionary position.”
And then Jessica Beers, who writes under J.L. Beers, asked a question about handling negative reviews, and I really got on my soap box.
By the end of the con, I’d signed for seventeen and a half hours straight, gone viral to a whole new audience, and felt not like a dinosaur on the way out, but an OG who people still thought was funny as shit.
It was a highlight of my career, honestly.
And…you did that.
