In just a two-hour window on Friday, my night got very, very … strange. This is how it started:
After work I wandered into the bar at the Grand Hyatt hotel to visit my friend Kevin, who is a bartender, when he tells me that there’s a writer’s conference of some sort going on in the hotel. Natrually, my eyes perk right up, and when an older gentleman with a name badge walked by, we started chatting to him, and turns out he was a heckuva good guy.
The convention was ThrillerFest, for tIn just a two-hour window on Friday, my night got very, very … strange. This is how it started:
After work I wandered into the bar at the Grand Hyatt hotel to visit my friend Kevin, who is a bartender, when he tells me that there’s a writer’s conference of some sort going on in the hotel. Natrually, my eyes perk right up, and when an older gentleman with a name badge walked by, we started chatting to him, and turns out he was a heckuva good guy.
The convention was ThrillerFest, for thrillers and such. Cop books, espionage, serial killer stories. Vampires. So not really the kind of thing I work on, but still, writers and writers, and you never know what can come of it.
So it turns out that it took the writer–Thomas O’Collaghan (www.thomasocallaghan.com) 12 years just to land an agent. Talk about persistence! But now he’s got two books out, which are doing quite well, and one of them is being made into a movie.
He also invited me up to see a panel he was on, which I did. The moderator was David Morrell, the author who wrote the novel [i]First Blood[/i], which launched the Rambo movies with Sylvester Stallone. And the panel itself was about villains, and how the different writers think about and approach villains, so I thought it was a pretty cool panel.
At the end of the panel I stopped by to say hello to Thomas, and he was quite nice about it. I also wound up meeting a book editor, who thought [i]Finders Keepers[/i] sounded kinda cool, and is interested in reading it. So … nice!
I called it a night after that, as I was headed off to a concert, but that’s when my evening really began to get strange …
To Be Continued
