Back From BEA

I'm back from the BEA and boy are my arms tired. No, that's not cheesy flying joke. My arms are really sore from the jackpot of new books I scored. Part of me is sad that I could only make it to one day of the weekend long event and part of me is wondering where I could have possibly fit more books if I had more time.

Friday I took my mother and my daughter to the Book Expo America in New York City. It was so much fun. We met many authors and were lucky enough to get their newest books signed. I was going to list them all here, but decided it was just too much. The picture above doesn't do justice to them all. I will be talking more about each book as I read them.

We all loved meeting the authors and talking about their books and publishing in general. Of course, we loved the books themselves. My mother has always been an avid reader. She has kept me surrounded by books my whole life. Although I tried to fight off the reading bug, I finally caught it and have since passed it to my daughter. Which, go figure, isn't such a bad thing after all. Where my mother was excited about the day and the book, my daughter was beside herself. She told every author she was starting her own library of personalized books. They all loved this and wrote some really sweet things to her.

I am sure there will be many stories about the BEA, so I won't bore you with details. Besides, this being my first time, and the limited time I was there, I am definitely not an expert. I can, however share some of the highlights of our experience.

We started our day catching the 6:00 AM train and headed off to New York City. The trip took 3+ hours. Once arriving in Manhattan we set off on foot to the Jacob Javit's Center. We said we would take a cab, but once your feet hit the pavement you feel the energy and think you can walk anywhere. How far can it be anyway, it's only 7th Ave to 11th? So we walk...and it's not so bad. Anything is better than being in a NYC cab with my mother. We made that mistake before and she literally screamed the whole time. That poor cab driver probably quit.

After enjoying the day meeting authors, publishers, publicists, and fellow book lovers it was time to gather our bags and begin our journey home. We started with one each and ended up with six bags full of books, posters and other promotional items. This is how the load was distributed. My daughter had her original bag with a few added favorite items, my mother had her original and an additional, which left the other three to me. The ones I got stuck with held the bulk of our books. Look again at the picture above and double it. That still doesn't cover how many we had between us. I have to stress this because my arms are really sore and it makes me feel better to complain a little.

We lugged these bags all the way back to the train station, because for some unknown reason we still thought it wasn't that bad of a walk. Well, this time it was...really bad. Not only did we have a much heavier load but it was also uphill going back. I have already vowed that next time we are taking a cab, even if I have to bring a sedative for my mother.

Finally, back on the train at 5:45 PM and looking forward to sitting, I ask everyone what their favorite part of the day was.

My mother's was being handed one of the last extra copies of Emeril's new book, Emeril at the Grill and getting his autograph. This doesn't surprise me since she has become one of his biggest stalkers, I mean fans lately. He has been doing a lot of signings in our area lately. This is the third time she has met him in less than a month.

My daughter's favorite thing was meeting Jane Lovascio, who I recently did a blog post about. She thought Jane was very nice and loved meeting the real life stars of her books, Casey and Bella. They are Jane's cute dogs and were there to do paw signings.

I loved the whole day. My highlights were meeting some of the people I follow on Twitter, like Luis and Cindy Urrea. Luis is the author of Into the Beautiful North and I have enjoyed hearing about their recent book tour adventures. But I think the best part of it all can be explained better by a picture I took of how we spent most of the time coming home.

Since I am still learning about this blog stuff I finally had to give up trying to figure how to get another picture to go where I wanted. So I put it in the previous post.