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| Author Kitty Kelley (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Last Monday was the Bloggers at BEA conference. As with last year, this was not specifically useful to me, except in meeting up with some nice authors and nice bloggers. I met Kitty Kelley, Erin McHugh. and Erin Swofford all of who had out new books. I also met the phenomenally nice women from KISMET blog tours. Jen from Supernatural Snark, Melissa from Melissa Swims, and Allison from Allison can Read. They really seem to have it together.
Even though Special Diet requests were actually part of the registration, no gluten free food was available for breakfast or lunch. Since this was part of what I paid for it points to administrative disorganization uncommon for events planners. It was REEDS first year owning the conference and they had dedicated a person to its administration. That's probably why we almost managed to stay on schedule which is notoriously hard for conferences.
The author speed dating in the morning went better than last year except the categories arranged did not apply to my needs. I ended up in memoir and cook books. A panel for the whole assembly, after Jennifer Weiner's amusing and helpful keynote was Blogging, What You Need to Know and What's Next seemed to focus on plagiarism on blogs.
The Afternoon session I chose was Critical Reviews, Honing Your
Craft. It had nothing to do with honing your craft. One blogger panelist took 15 minutes to tell us the
one thing we should take out of the session. Well, she was asked for
one thing by the panel director, Barbara Hoffert, and gave us five. Another panelist was a lovely blogger who was, unfortunately, tongue tied on stage. And the third was a lawyer who spoke about the difference between liable and opinion. That was interesting but had nothing to do with honing my craft. I opted not to attend the rest of the day since I had the big Harper Collins bash that night. What a fun party that was. I met several interesting bloggers, including Angie from Angieville, Holly from A Harbinger of Books, Amanda from Stains on the page. Along with the great staff of publicists at Harper Collins, I met some authors including Michael Boccacino who has a new book out Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling coming out with Harpers in July.I hope to feature it on Fangs, Wands and Fairy Dust.
The party was at the K Lounge, the upstairs bar of the Karma Restaurant. It had bas-reliefs from the Kama Sutra on the walls; and of course that's the first thing I noticed. But it was a great party and very kind of Harpers to invite me.
