ThrillerFest Bulletpoints

Weekend Update to come first thing Monday morning after four days spent intermittently at the Grand Hyatt for Thrillerfest – and perhaps appropriately, this report is bulleted in scattershot fashion:

  • It’s damn hard to go to a convention in your home town because of the commute, however light in realistic terms. BEA’s different, probably because the trade show element feels more like work or because I can manage it better somehow. So that’s why I wasn’t in the bar all that much, at least not after about 11 or so.
  • Your Thriller Award winners: Joe Finder, Nick Stone, P.J. Parrish and Eric Roth. Congrats to all.
  • Evidently Roth would have been happy to come to the banquet if he’d known about the nomination.
  • I wonder if the prize Zoe Sharp won during the panel I thought of as “Truth or Lie?” would have been appropriate for the banquet.
  • It’s one thing to have an invitation-only party and have word get around – nothing propagates like word of an open bar. But announcing said invitation-only party on the hotel screencrawl is another matter.
  • Speaking of propagation, pretty much everybody was talking about Barry Eisler’s new book deal with Ballantine’s Mark Tavani, brokered by Dan Conaway and Simon Lipskar.
  • The Killerettes: good, clean wholesome fun or a setback to female writers?
  • Ali Karim, in possession of the most dangerous water bottle known to man.
  • Okay, so maybe it’s me, but I thought the ARCs would be given away in the book bags, not tied up in impossible-to-untie bows at the banquet tables. I hope they all found good homes.
  • Four people whose company I was glad to keep for long periods of time in the bar: Dana Kaye, Mike Stotter, Nick Stone and Larry Gandle.
  • And yeah, we’re stuck with Posh and Becks, dammit.
  • Next time ThrillerFest should get a Cincinnati Red to be on one of the panels. Maybe Ken Griffey, Jr.
  • I spent far too much time amusing myself in the book room looking at old author photos of people who once had hair.
  • Keith Kahla wore an Armani suit and Cole Haan shoes. I point this out b/c this ensemble may never be seen in public again.
  • Dave White makes his panel debut.
  • I do believe the line (about to be misquoted by me, natch) of the banquet belonged to James Patterson, who compared the banquet proceedings to FINNEGANS WAKE. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it just wasn’t what I was expecting of a thriller convention.”
  • Some consensus on this year’s ThrillerFest: more scattered, more reader-driven panels, more competition with outside interests, but still fun.
  • Next year’s ThrillerFest: may well be in New York again, with San Francisco rumored for 2009.
  • And as always, thanks to all who said hello, had kind words for the blog or other nice things to say.