Chicago Writers Conference 2013

I love Chicago! Lake Michigan was blue enough this weekend to have swallowed the sky, wide and flat and shimmering all the way to the horizon. Rachel and I ate pasta at an outdoor table, stood in the spray of Buckingham fountain with our shoes in our hands and sampled the best coffee in the world at Lavazza. ​
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Congress Plaza Hotel is stately and elegant, all plush blue carpet and antique light fixtures. It’s not hard to picture Al Capone in this setting, cocktail glass in hand, cigar poised between cruel lips in that big moon face. The doorknob on our bathroom rattled in the middle of the night, and for a full minute I couldn’t breathe, lol.
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Much to learn at the conference! We brushed elbows with publishers and marketing professionals, and were relieved to find them so friendly and informative. Regular people after all! We scribbled notes like mad, and I had, for just the briefest moment, a sense of time just whooshing by us – only a day or two ago, I was coloring at the kitchen table with this little girl, and now here she is, a bright and lovely and so-grown-up college girl. But that’s another story entirely - and of course we took pictures! Enjoy!