Bouchercon!

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I went to Bouchercon last week, Wednesday through Sunday, after looking forward to it for months on end. It was an amazing time. I finally got to meet my agent, Janet Reid, more than two years after signing with her. I also met several of her clients, who up until then I'd only seen or talked to online: Gary Corby, Dan Krokos, Dana Cameron, Andrew Grant, and Eric Stone. Oh, yeah, and I got to thank Lee Child in person for the blurb that's going on the cover of The Breach.

Also got to meet a lot of people from HarperCollins, which was extremely cool. Great to be able to thank them in person for everything they're doing with the book. I know I can't begin to understand the amount of work they're all doing on this, but I'm very, very grateful.

Thanks also to Kathryn Kennison and everybody at the Indiana Humanities Council. The panel on Wednesday evening was a great time, and thankfully much less intimidating an environment than I'd imagined. (Speaking in front of groups is something I'm still working on; the two times in my life I've had to make wedding toasts, I haven't gotten much sleep the night before.)

The five days at Bouchercon flew. It occurred to me only later that I'd pretty much blocked out the entire world beyond the interior of the Indianapolis Hyatt. I got back to my place on Sunday afternoon, went online, and learned that the world had been transfixed for several days by the exploits of Balloon Boy. Wow. How did I manage to survive five whole days without exposure to the 24-hour news cycle? I must be like one of those monks who can slow down their metabolism by sheer willpower, and live for weeks without food or water.

Technical Difficulties

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Anyone who happened to visit this site in the past month was probably a bit confused by what they saw. To make a very long story short, this site was under someone else's control for a while. The domain registration lapsed without my knowing (that's part of what makes it a long story), and someone else snagged it out from under me and turned it into an SEO site to advertise writing contests. Just the kind of thing you want happening, when your first book is a couple months from hitting the stands, and your website address is printed on the back cover.

Anyway, four very frustrating weeks later it's back in my clutches. I'll say this much: if you have a private domain, make sure your ownership of it is set up to auto-renew at each deadline, or at the very least, make sure you remember what the deadline is. In my case, two things went wrong: I thought I had auto-renew set up (I didn't), and I also changed e-mail addresses in the past year, and forgot to update the e-mail address I had on file with my domain registrar. So when my domain was getting ready to expire, they were sending me notifications, but I wasn't getting any of them. I didn't know anything was wrong until the day I went to my own site and found someone else's page there instead of mine. If you're looking to pioneer whole new ways of combining expletives at high pitch and/or volume, then I heartily recommend going through this experience.