"Good grief. He didn't tell me he was a speaker. How sneaky," Jane said.
"Who is Mel?" Felicity asked.
"Jane's honey," Shelley said.
"Damned good-looking man," Felicity said.
Jane flipped to a page at the back and said, "Wow! There are agents and editors here that you can see and talk to privately for fifteen minutes," Jane said. "I had no idea. Which would be a good one, Felicity?"
"Let's take it up with us and look it over," Felicity responded.
Felicity was frankly astonished at the suite Jane and Shelley were staying in. Shelley had to explain, with enormous modesty, that her husband had invested in the hotel and that part of the deal was having the suite be available to his family or friends when it wasn't otherwise booked.
Jane was impatient but tried not to show it. She wanted desperately to return to the registration booth before all the editors and agents were booked up. As they'd waited for the elevator, quite a few attendees had already lined up.
Felicity appeared to sense her tension and the reason for it. "Let me look at that. Oh, they're all baby editors and agents."
"Babies?"
"New ones with names like Tiffany and Bambi. But that's okay," Felicity said, "if they're babies in a good agency or publishing house. There are normally only a few heads of houses or agencies at small conferences like this." She pulled out her green-ink book-signing pen and checked three. Two agents and one editor.
"These are with good companies. And they're eager to come back to work with something to show for being sent here at their employers' expense."
"I don't see Sophie Smith on this list. Isn't she a really important editor?" Jane asked.
"Yes, but she leaves things like this to her underlings. Downtrodden people like that poor Corwin she drags around with her and abuses in public. You don't want to be with her anyway."
"What would you both like to drink?" Shelley asked them.
"I'll have a soft drink, something brown. Coke or Royal Crown if you have any," Felicity said. "And Jane needs to run back downstairs and make her appointments before the slots all fill."
"Thanks," Jane said. "I think we're twins separated at birth. RC is my favorite, too."
"Are you prepared for these interviews?" Felicity asked.
"I have the whole manuscript with me, but I didn't think anybody would want to weigh down their luggage with it."
"Do you have the first couple of chapters and an outline with you?"
"Yes, I do," Jane said.
"Good for you, girl!" Felicity lifted a fist as the woman in the restaurant had done. "You've done your homework. Now scat. Oh, let me write my room number down. Call me when you know who you sign up with."
Jane returned to the suite forty-five minutes later. Shelley was sitting in one of the chairs with her bare feet up on a coffee table, reading a book. "Did you find who you wanted?"
"Amazingly, I did. Sometime between now andtomorrow morning I have to run home and make copies. Just on the faint hope that all three will want to see the chapters and outlines."
"There's a copy shop in the mall just across the parking lot," Shelley told her. "Spring for their prices and don't waste your time going home."
"Where did you find that book? It's Felicity's latest. I already had a copy you could have read."
"Jane, where is your head?" Shelley exclaimed. "Authors come to these things to sell books. There's a room just to the west side of the registration desk where there are four booksellers. I wouldn't dream of borrowing your book and cutting down on what she earns on this. And besides, I want it autographed to me."
Jane slapped her head. "Do you have any more RCs? Somebody stepped on my foot in line and I need to put it up for a few minutes."
"Not the foot you broke?"
"No, the other one," she said, taking off her shoe and rubbing her little toe as Shelley brought her a drink.
Shelley said, "I've been thinking about that Zac person. Felicity said he'd written a couple of books. I'll bet that's why he was forcing one on Sophie Smith. Wanting to get back in the game."
"You could be right. He'd probably make a better living writing his own books than reviewing others. And if he continued to do both…"
Now that she had Jane's agreement to her theory, Shelley said, "Let's pick out what to wear at
the dessert bar tonight, then we can go have your copies done, and you can have part of the afternoon to mingle."
"I'm not a very good mingler," Jane admitted.
"Everybody has these tags with their names on them. Just approach anyone standing alone and introduce yourself. Easy as pie."
"First, I must call Felicity while I'm still shoeless and tell her I lucked into the appointments I wanted." But Felicity wasn't in her room and Jane left a message.
"See, Jane? She's out mingling," Shelley said smugly.
Jane pointedly ignored this and glanced again at the schedule. "I want to go hear what Sophie Smith says this afternoon at the opening ceremony."
Going to the copy shop wasn't exciting but it was better than trying to make lifelong friends with strangers. Jane took her outline and the chapters and had three copies made. She bought three simple buff-colored folders to put them in, forgoing the copy shop's more attractive folders — floral, neon transparent, and a pink she liked. She knew, however, that making something "cute" was the sign of an amateur. She chose the fourth folder in bright orange for her own copy. She simply couldn't resist.
When she returned to the hotel, she parked closer to the copy center than to the hotel itself, then trudged clear across the increasingly hotpavement and went up to the suite to leave the copies. She was still hot, so she had another soft drink. She also called the front desk to ask if Mel VanDyne had checked in yet. The clerk said he was booked to arrive the next day. Knowing full well she was dawdling, she finally broke down and went to the lobby.
Jane mingled to the best of her ability. A few of the seemingly lonely attendees were simply waiting for the rest of their friends to arrive. Jane introduced herself anyway, and said how much she was looking forward to this conference. "I've never been to one of these. Have you?" she asked the first woman she accosted.
"Oh, I go to all of them. I'm an autographed-book junkie. Oh, there's Susan. Nice to meet you, Joyce."
"Jane," Jane said to herself as the woman disappeared.
A couple of the solitary figures she tried to mingle with seemed to want to latch on to her for dear life. She was nice to them, but eventually did the same thing the first woman had done to her. Pretending to see a lifelong friend. But Jane said the women's names right.
She met two other rather aggressive unpublished authors who hoped Jane was an editor or agent. This was quickly sorted out. They hadn't realized until then that the name tags were color-coded in order to differentiate among fans, writers, editors, agents, and booksellers.
She gave up trolling the lobby and went to the booksellers' room. This was, naturally, a much better experience. People who love books love promoting their favorites to other people who love books.
Jane struck up several cheerful conversations with shoppers from the conference who insisted she buy several authors she'd never heard of before.
When she forced herself to stop running up her credit card, she had a bag of books she could hardly manage to carry back to the room by herself.