My August Birthday

 

Honestly, birthdays don’t have the same impact as they used to. First double digits, then being able to drive and vote. The big 3-0, the big 5-0, then Medicare. 67 isn’t a big deal.

Late August has always been a busy time to have a birthday. For kids it’s the last chance to have summer fun, and I never got to celebrate in a classroom. When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, we didn’t go back to school until the Thursday after Labor Day.

One of my best birthdays was spent at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in rural Vermont. It was the only time I was able to celebrate in a group of my peers. They announced birthdays at group dinnertime, and a chorus of a couple of hundred voices joined in song.

Then back to school developed a different meaning once I became a full-time professor of English. New syllabi, hundreds of new student names to learn, even new classes to teach and new colleagues in the department.

The day after my birthday I’m leaving for Nashville, Tennessee, to attend Bouchercon, the largest gathering of fans of the mystery genre. There will be over 1500 of us at the Gaylord Opryland Resort. If your tastes are on the cozy end of the spectrum, I’ll be on a panel about soft-boiled crime. I’m also on the first panel of the event, on Wednesday afternoon, talking about how I balance out different series. (TL:DR, after finishing a book I love to jump to a different character, a new location or even time period. It keeps the writing fresh for me.)

I’ve changed my approach to conferences. When I was working full-time and writing on the side, I seized every chance to slip away from the con and write. I knew the location of every Starbucks in the area around the hotel. Now that I have so much time to write, I cherish the chance to interact with people. I’ve gone through the schedule looking for opportunities to network and meet readers and editors. I hope to learn about anthology calls, joint promotions, and new trends in crime fiction.

And of course I’m looking forward to meeting readers. There’s nothing more gratifying than having someone come up to me and say that they love my books. And I hope to introduce readers to Steve and Rochester, Kimo, Angus, and Aidan and Liam.

I’ll also be at reading briefly at an event called Cocktails and Cozies, shmoozing at the bar with other LGBTQ authors on Friday evening, and participating in a speed-dating event on Saturday morning. My friend Clea Simon and I will be traveling around a room of readers table by table. Each of us will have one minute to talk about our books, then a bell will ring and we’ll move to the next table. It’s exhausting but fun, and a chance to talk one-on-one to over 150 readers.

I hope you’ve had a great summer, with the chance to read some fun books. My favorite has been Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It’s about two high school game-playing friends who go on to develop computer games, and I enjoyed a trip down memory lane recalling my own gaming days. (Nine years producing Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune for many different platforms.)

Happy reading!