Me, signing books at Seattle Mystery Bookshop. I signed at Left Coast, too, but was one of the smaller frogs in that big pond.

I just returned from four days at Left Coast Crime in beautiful Monterey, California, and I am exhausted. I can’t decide whether my fatigue is from multiple mornings when I had to arise at 3:30 a.m. to make my flight, or because I’m an introvert and crowds make me a little crazy, or simply because the conference was so interesting that my brain cannot absorb meeting one more author or discovering yet another whole series of mysteries that I simply have to read.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about AWP, a conference that is designed more for MFA writer types than for us proud-to-be-genre writers. LCC is completely different–it’s a fan conference, so all the attendees are enthusiastic mystery readers, although quite a few of us are authors, too. It’s one of those rare conventions where you overhear conversations about where to hide a severed head and the least detectable poisons to use to kill off your enemy. What more could a mystery writer like me ask for?

I was the token woman on a panel with four other private-investigators-turned-authors. The crowd included (to my amazement) Sue Grafton, an author who truly gets what it’s like to be a female PI. I later ambushed her in a rare solitary moment (sorry, Sue) to have the honor of shaking her hand. She gave me a hug. I hope some of her publishing success pixie dust rubbed off on me!

Author panel with two of my faves–Craig Johnson at left and Sara J. Henry at right.

Every panel I went to was well attended by an enthusiastic audience, and all the speakers were interesting (which I certainly can’t say about every conference I’ve attended). After stalking charming funny country boy Craig Johnson (author of the Longmire series) on multiple panels and chatting with him in person (I come from a long line of tall tale tellers and I swear he’s a long lost cousin) , I’ve decided that I too need to wear a cowgirl hat so people can find me, especially since I’m vertically challenged. However, Craig’s hat fits in with his author persona (Wyoming sheriff etc.) and since I have two different series, one about wilderness issues and one about signing gorillas, I’m not quite sure of the right headgear to represent my writing–a sun visor? A baseball cap? A gorilla mask? My character Neema has been known to wear an orange peel on top of her head, but that doesn’t seem quite right, either, although it would probably make me more memorable.

The only downside to the conference was that it was so huge. I found it hard to locate a few folks I was looking for, namely Jeanne Matthews and Tracy Weber, fellow authors from Washington state, and Donnell Ann Bell from Colorado. I did run across Jeanne and Donnell in passing, and finally spotted Tracy sitting behind me at a session, but I promptly lost them all again in the crush.

I made a lot of new friends, and shared a table the last evening with authors Sara J. Henry and Chris F. Holm and a mix of other writers and fascinating fans, whom I would write more about if I’d been able to hear what they said in the uproar of the large ballroom or if the waiter hadn’t continued to re-fill my glass with delicious red wine.

See, I DO sometimes wear a cowgirl hat!

Having found so many new-to-me authors whose mysteries I can’t wait to read, I staggered home lugging more books than Alaska Airlines would have allowed had they weighed my carry-on. It’ll probably take me a whole year to read all these new series, as well as to decide what sort of headgear to wear to the Left Coast Crime Conference 2015.