November 1, 2005
Okay, more on Magna.

The Roberts Hotel in Muncie, IN, where the conference is held, is one of those older downtown hotels, elegant, nicely kept up. It is, unfortunately, also about 100 yards from the train tracks, and trains run through town about every 20 minutes, blowing their whistles as they do. Nostalgia aside, this is no big deal. It just becomes part of the background ... until early morning. I decided to skip the welcome breakfast for a number of reasons, one being I'm crabby enough in the morning without having to eat with 300 people I don't know, and I wasn't overly interested in the first meetings in the morning. I figured a good night's sleep would be more useful. So I placed the Breakfast Express form on my doorknob to deliver my room service breakfast between 8:15 and 8:30 and set the alarm for 8:00. At 5:22 the train came through town and the conductor wailed on that whistle for what seemed like an hour. Boom! Wide awake! And I tried to get back to sleep, but 15 minutes or so later, another train ... and another...

Somewhere around 7:40 I threw in the towel, got up, practiced my karate forms to get the blood flowing, took a shower and waited for my breakfast to show up. It never did. They never picked up the form.

So around 8:45 I went down to the hotel restaurant and had breakfast, eavesdropping on a conversation in the next booth by who I think was author Terence Faherty and a few other people. Then I went back to the room for a bit, getting my act together. I drifted over to the Mezzanine level to see where my PBS TV interview was going to be and decided to just hang out there for a while. Carl Brookins came out. He had been scheduled before me and they were running early. Carl and I chatted for a bit, then I went in and did my TV interview, which I thought went pretty well.

10:30. Go over to the Horizon Center and run into Harlen Coben. I say hi and ask him, "Shouldn't you be across the street for your TV interview?" He mutters something about, "I thought somebody mentioned that, guess I'd better go over there," and he takes off. I go into a panel run by Kit Ehrman, who I had had a lovely conversation with the night before. The panel is titled Building Detectives from the Ground Up and has Sara Hoskinson Frommer, Alex Matthews, Mary Monica Pulver and Mark Zubro on it.

11:55. Leave the panel and run into Dennis Collins and Michael Ball, who it turns out lives about 8 miles from me. We get into a lengthy conversation, then go our separate ways, me to hunt for a restroom, then off to the Interurban Hall for lunch. I'm at a table with Chester Campbell and his wife, two lovely non-authors, god bless them, and Canadian author Maureen Jennings and her husband, Iden. Lunch is lasagna, salad, bread and pie. After we eat, Barbara D'Amato interviews Harlan Coben, forcing him to read a bit from one of the Myron Bolitar novels involving a sexual pun involving the word "succumb" that Harlan manages to do without hiding under the podium.

1:30. I had originally planned to catch another panel, but I'm getting a headache, so I head back to my room and search for the Tylenol. I alternate between reading and watching "Twister" and the MSU-Indiana football game for a while, then before 3:00 I go find the room where I'm moderating a panel on mystery reviewers.

3:00 Panel. First time I ever moderated and I guess it went well. Several people said it was fine, more like a conversation among the panelists, which is more or less what I was going after.

4:00. Sign books, or perhaps I should say "book," because that's how many I sold. On my left was Parnell Hall and on my right was Mark Zubro. Mark Zubro seemed to be more or less in the same boat and commented, "Well, my fan showed up, so I guess it's time to go." My feelings exactly. I chatted with Michael Dymmoch for a bit, said hello to Parnell, spoke briefly with Robert Greer, then ran off to catch a panel at 4:30 called SUSPENSE: Crafting twists and reversals, keeping the pages turning, moderated by DC Brod with Michael Ball, Harlan Coben, Michael Allen Dymmoch and John Ramsey Miller. I'm particularly intrigued by Miller's books and have put him on a short list of books to pick up.

5:45. Not much going on. Banquet isn't until 7:00. I go back to my room, eat an apple, then drop down to Flappers, the bar and order a beer. It's Halloween weekend so the surly bartenders are dressed as vampires. There's a guy dressed as a very ugly woman holding down one end of the bar and smoking a cigarette, and it's the cig that drives me out of the bar more than anything else. I wander back up to my room and take a break until the banquet.

7:00. Banquet. I'm sitting at a table with Dennis Collins, Michael Ball, author Mignon Ballard and her husband, and two women who I believe are readers and fans, but I never did catch their names. I mostly chat with Mignon, who has written 14 books. I comment to her that that's a career and she says, "Well, I don't make enough money to live off," and I counter that that wasn't my point, that having 14 novels published is a career, a great accomplishment, no matter how many you books you sell. She's a lovely woman and I'm going to keep her books in mind.

The guest speaker is Thomas Lynch, a National Book Award winning poet, and doesn't seem to have much to do with a bunch of mystery writers, but he's hilarious and sad and moving and rather wonderful. I said hello afterwards, then got into a long conversation with Michael Ball and Dennis Collins until I decided to go back to my room and go to bed.

Up again the next morning at 5:20, but decided to just go ahead and get up, pack, checkout, and am on the road back home by 7:00 in the morning. I visit my mother in the nursing home on the way home, but make it home by around 2:00, pretty much exhausted from the whole thing.

Best,
Mark Terry