Text By Tony DiMartino

“Don’t run off with some muscular guy in tight pants and a pirate shirt,” my husband smirked as he dropped me off at the 22nd Annual Booklovers Convention last year.

The four-day event, sponsored by Romantic Times BOOKclub Magazine, drew nearly 1,000 attendees from all over the world, most of them fans but many of them aspiring writers. They were there to meet their favorite authors, polish their skills in workshops, network with agents and editors, and party, party, party.

If you think the typical romance reader is an overweight trailer park resident with a bad perm, think again. At the ’05 convention, silken-haired girls in low-slung jeans and high-heeled boots mingled with sensibly shod matrons. “It’s like a family reunion,” said former bookstore owner Patti Lewis, an impeccably manicured woman known as Pat the Hat. “I’ve been going for 15 years, and you see the same people over and over. We have a ball!”

“You make new friends, too,” added dainty, razor-witted Mary Bullard, who owns the Paperbacks Ink bookstore in Newport News, Virginia. “We stay in touch with each other via email all year round.”

For aspiring writers, attending the convention is like being embraced in a massive group hug. The workshops (with titles like “Novelists’ Boot Camp” and “How to Write for the African-American Market”) provide instruction and encouragement from well-known writers, agents, and editors…and sometimes lead to the kind of opportunities that all struggling writers dream about.

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