Thursday, June 04, 2009

BEA 2009 Trip Report (part 4)

Click here to read parts one, two, and three.

Part Four: Saturday at BEA

Slept for three hours and then trotted back to NYC all
bright eyed and bushy-tailed. Sort of.

Me after three hours sleep

I visited the Simon & Schuster booth first and then headed over with Justin Chanda (my publisher at S&S) to Holly Black, Cassie Clare, and Scott Westerfeld's Alternate History panel. While waiting for the panel to begin, we discussed the impracticality of Wonder Woman's invisible jet. I'm always bothered by the fact that the jet doesn't make her invisible, and Justin pointed out that the jet is never referred to as soundless. So you have this seated woman zipping through the air to the roar of a jet engine. Not so stealthy.

After the panel, I ran into Marie Rutkoski and Jennifer from the Grand Central Branch of the New York Public Library, who invited me to j
oin them for lunch. Lunch plans expanded to include Ally Carter, Jen Barnes, and Sarah Cross, and then contracted again to just Marie, Jenny, and me, and then expanded again so that the final table was Marie, Jenny, Cassandra Clare, Josh Lewis, Theo Black, Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, and me. It was a bit like musical lunch chairs. Everyone kept swapping seats. You never knew who you'd be seating beside next.

For the rest of the afternoon, I alternated between
wandering the exhibit hall and hanging out in the S&S booth. I talked with a wide variety of people, from Scholastic's Arthur Levine, to a super-nice Massachusetts librarian who had witnessed my dismal Rock Star abilities at MLA the other weekend, to Olivia. (Olivia didn't talk much.)

Me & Olivia

In the evening, I went out to dinner with the fabulous Wendy Mass and Courtney Sheinmel at a fabulous Italian restaurant. I ordered two appetizers as my entree and worried a little that they'd think that was weird, but then Wendy ordered the same thing, proving herself a kindred spirit, and Courtney was later responsible for the chocolate souffle, proving herself a kindred spirit as well.

Me, Wendy Mass, Courtney Sheinmel, and chocolate souffle

After the souffle, Wendy and I bullied Courtney into agreeing to take a taxi rather than a subway to the YA/MG Drinks Night at a bar in Alphabet City (lower east side of Manhattan). (I'm a total subway coward. I thoroughly expect fights to rage over the roofs of the subway cars like in movies and monstrous worms/dragons to attempt to devour us.) After a stereotypically harrowing taxi ride, we were the first to arrive at the party.

Barry Lyga, Coe Booth, Michael Northrop, Courtney Sheinmel, me, Wendy Mass

We were later joined by Ally Carter, Jen Barnes, Bennett Madison, Megan Crewe, Lisa Greenwald, Tara Altebrando, Christopher Paolini, Eric Luper, G. Neri, Lynn Weingarten, Sarah Mylnowski, and many others.

I stayed as long as I could and then scooted out to catch the last train back to Long Island again. I was home by 2am.

And that, my friends, was BEA! I can't wait for next year!

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6 Comments:

At 11:59 PM, Anonymous hedgi said...

i have been wondering this whole time, and cursing both my final exam stressed brain for not knowing/ laziness to not bother to find out- what is a BEA? i mean.. i know that i wish i had been able to meet you/all the other amazing author ppl that were there.... but other than that, i'm kind of drawing a blank. then again, i never was good at art... heh.

just wanted to mention, today the berkeley library finally got 'out of the wild'( yours truly may or may not have mentioned it's awesomeness as i spoke with the head children's librarian, with whom i am on good terms with, despite the fact that i owe ten bucks because of 'forgetting' to return 'into the wild' several weeks ago)

 
At 7:03 AM, Blogger Sarah Beth Durst said...

Hedgi: BEA stands for Book Expo America. It's an annual convention where publishers present the upcoming books to booksellers. There are panels where people discuss publishing and bookselling trends, but the main feature is the exhibit hall where most publishers have booths.

Great to hear your library now has Out of the Wild!

 
At 4:00 PM, Blogger Sookie said...

Oh! That's such a cute picture! Come to think of it, that's how I'm bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. BEA sounds like it would be so much fun. I can't wait to read Ice!

 
At 10:42 AM, Blogger Sarah Beth Durst said...

Sookie: The squirrel picture is from I Can Has Cheezburger. I can't wait for Ice to come out. Hope you like it!

 
At 7:41 PM, Blogger BookChook said...

I was so envious of all the book bloggers and writerfolks heading off to BEA and me stuck here on the other side of the planet! And somehow, I've been so busy, I didn't ever catch much more than tweets about it. So I totally enjoyed your write-up, which let me share the fun and friendliness and deep deep thoughts - WonderWoman indeed!

 
At 8:39 PM, Blogger Sarah Beth Durst said...

The Book Chook: Thanks! So glad you liked it!

 

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