I've Got a Zoom ID, Let's Put on a Show!
The romance reading series I co-curate has moved online. I think it went pretty well.
It’s been a bit longer than I’d anticipated since the last newsletter! I apologize for that. One of the things that I’ve been working on in that time is Lady Jane’s Salon, a reading series for romance writers I’ve co-curated for more than a decade. Usually, we meet every other month at Madame X, a very cool bar on Houston Street in lower Manhattan. Back in March, though, we made the decision to postpone our April event to May, hopeful that the situation might have resolved by now. Oh, how optimistic we were in those days!
Anyway, it wasn’t too long into April that we realized holding a reading in a bar in Manhattan on May 4th wasn’t likely to happen, and I decided to explore our options for doing the event virtually. It was soon apparent that our best option was to record a Zoom meeting, and we set aside a Sunday afternoon at the end of the month when everyone would be available.
That reading is now on YouTube, featuring three great authors: Skye McDonald, Adriana Herrera, and Maya Rodale. They each picked some fun scenes from their most recent books, which are all available in one form or another from WORD, an indie bookstore in Brooklyn and Jersey City that does a great job of covering the romance market. (Skye’s Nemesis is only available in print there, and Adriana’s American Sweethearts is only available as an ebook, but Maya’s An Heiress to Remember is available in either format.)
Watching the footage, it’s really obvious that I need a haircut, but I also realized how much fun I was having during the event—that it felt really good to be doing something with writers I liked, supporting a genre that I like, and putting it out there for other fans as well. We’re going to do another reading later this month, so we can have it online by June 1st, and now that I’ve got the technical side of things sorted out, I’m looking forward to it even more.
If you are already a fan of romance fiction, I think you’re really going to enjoy this event. If you aren’t, I have an argument in its favor—or just give this reading a try!