What We Got Up to at RT 2014

Two weeks ago, Heather and I went to the RT Booklovers Convention in New Orleans, LA. For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, well, basically it’s like GRL but for the more mainstream writers. It’s a HUGE convention filled with SOOO many panels and SOOO many authors that even two weeks later I’m still going “OMG, so and so was at RT and I didn’t get to see them?! NOOOOO!”

Anyway, HC and I both enjoy our M/F books and before we got into M/M we had a ton of favorite authors and series that we used to keep track of (this was back when we read prints lol). So, we had a lot of books we wanted to get signed at this convention. I don’t think we ever counted how many we ended up originally bringing ourselves (maybe around 35 each?) but you’ll be SHOCKED at how many frees books we brought back!

Let’s rewind a little bit. I ended up flying to Louisiana a few days before the convention to stay with HC. She’s just a few hours away from NOLA, where the con was held, so we were going to drive down together and pick up our friend Jenn (not JustJen, another Jenn lol) along the way. We were all worried that we wouldn’t be able to fit our luggage in HC’s car, let alone how we’d fit on the way BACK from RT! But we did it! We stuffed ourselves in her Jeep and we got to RT!

And let me tell you, we ended up having a BLAST at RT. We learned so much at the Blogger Con that was held the day before RT started (things the four of us at TBG hope to implement on the blog soon) but more than that, we got to meet so many of our favorite M/F authors. Especially me! I’m a HUGE Nalini Singh fan! Heather’s a HUGE Kresley Cole fan and we BOTH got to meet the awesome writers! There were a ton of other authors we were glad we met like Larissa Ione, Lara Adrian, Jennifer L. Armentrout, Ilona and Gordon Andrews… I’ll stop there lol.

Some events at RT were chaotic but still fun. We went to a bunch of panels but also got to play fun games. We went to some of the nighttime events and even did our own thing one night. But Heather and I both agree that the highlight of our trip was probably getting to really hangout with Wade Kelly. This lady is so fun to be around (especially when Heather introduced her to the Hurricane) and we got some hilarious pictures with her.

Another highlight of the events is getting to see more of the M/M posse and getting to see people from GRL at RT as well, like Susan from Boys in our Books, Jay from Joyfully Jay, Brandilyn from Prism Book Alliance, Becky from Mrs. Condit and Friends, Leigh Logan from Under the Covers and so many others peeps. Hell, we even got to see our M/M authors like Damon Suede, Heidi Cullinan, Marie Sexton, Anne Tenino, JP Barnaby/Jamie Mayfield, Mary Calmes, Amber Kell, L.A. Witt… I can keep going lol. It was just great to see such a LGBTQ presence at RT and getting to talk to new people about LGBTQ and how it’s becoming more accepted and known.

Anyway, I don’t want to go into detail about all that we did so I’m just going to let some of the pictures do the talking. Heather and I had an idea to do a ‘daily selfie’ for each day I was with her (although I think we skipped two days! LMAO) but here they are:

Jenn from Love Bytes, Nikyta, Heather C, Susan from BioB	Heather C, Susan from BioB, Nikyta
Heather C, Nikyta, Wade Kelly	Heather C, Nikyta, Wade Kelly

Nikyta, Susan from BioB, Heather C, Jenn from Love Bytes, Jay from Joyfully Jay & Leigh from Under the Covers

We’ve got a ton more pictures including ones with authors and such but don’t want to clog the site with that many pictures! I’m just going to add a few others pics that Heather and I are QUITE proud of. We ended up bringing to RT this many books:

Nikyta’s stack

Heather’s stack

Buying this many books at RT (between the two of us):

AND, we ended up getting for FREE this many books (stacks of 20 each):

I believe our final count of books we got for free was around 190 or so. OMG, we were ALL shocked!

Phew! What a WEEK it was!

With that said, I’m going to leave this post at that. I’m still shocked at how many books I shipped home (still waiting on those damn suckers to arrive, too!) and I’m eager to get my greedy little hands on some of them to start reading… so, if in a few weeks you’re wondering why we are reviewing such an influx of M/F books… well, you can blame RT and the generosity of the authors, publishers and sponsors of that convention! LOL

Have a great Tuesday, everyone!