Well the news has definitely been spread!  Book Bloggers took NYC by storm last week, participating in Book Expo America and The Book Blogger Convention.  I’m pleased to say, based on comments made to me, that both appeared to be a rousing success.

I know I said I’d try to update my blog throughout the week, but yea, as you can see that didn’t quite happen.  I had all these grandiose ideas that I’d have a couple of hours here and there to throw up a quick post.  HA! Looking back on it now I see how laughable that idea really was.  So as a result here is a brief synopsis of the first half of my week:

Days One and Two (Saturday & Sunday)
As my BEA kickoff post shows, I did indeed arrive in NYC on Saturday and got all checked in.  Trish arrived not too terribly long after me and we enjoyed a quick dinner in the hotel restaurant before turning in for the night.  Sunday, however, was another story.  We drug our patoots out of bed and, along with Natasha ( who arrived early that morning after taking the red eye in from Utah) went to a greasy spoon for breakfast.

Sunday also found Trish and I filling up BBC swag bags with more great items provided to us by wonderful contributors.  Man, it was truly a sight to see when we sprawled all the bags out around the lounge of The Renaissance Hotel.

**  I need to sidetrack a second to give big shouts out to their staff.  I can’t begin to tell you how amazing everyone was — from the front desk (who gave us an awesome break on our room rate) to the bell staff (who drug up each and every one of the 250 bags then drug them back down and put them into my car for storage) we were cared for extraordinarily well.**

Once we got what was on site stuffed into the bags Trish took off for some fun bookstore time and I took to relaxing in the hotel room with miss Amy for a bit before our evening festivities commenced.  Speaking of which, the later hours of the evening brought with it fun and frivolity as a whole big group of us hung out and watched the series finale of LOST.

It was a sad affair to see some of my favorite characters leave us but I was glad to have experienced it with great friends!

Days Three and Four (Monday & Tuesday)
Monday found us traipsing across New York participating in some really awesome publishing house tours of Random House, Harper Collins and Scholastic.  I’m not going to do much writing about it here as it deserves a post of its own.  Watch out for my thoughts on those experiences later in the week.  Sadly, after all day on my feet I wasn’t able to get to the Teen Author Carnival as planned.  I was extremely bummed as I was really looking forward to it.  Thankfully I was able to follow it a bit on Twitter — looks like it was an excellent event!

Tuesday was the start of Book Expo America.  Given the fact that BEA is home to some really great educational sessions (not just free books y’all!) Rebecca and I didn’t want to let the opportunity pass without getting out there and seeing what the publishing industry is doing with social media.  We attended two great sessions (which we’ll likely recap on Social MediU at some point) — “Brining Authors to the Social Media Party” and “Building Online Reader Communities”.  Excellent presenters, excellent information, and overall a great experience meeting some awesome Twitter friends who are equally invested in the impact and influence social media has in the publishing industry.

Rounding out Tuesday Jenn and I went to Books of Wonder to see some awesome authors from the Class of 2K10.  Each of the lovely ladies in attendance spoke a bit about their book, did a small reading and then fielded questions from the crowd.

I have to say, Books of Wonder does a great job putting together these events.  It’s not the largest of stores but the staff is super helpful and things work really efficiently.  Seriously, a kidlit/YA centric bookstore?  How can I possibly find anything wrong with that.  Oh, and I totally didn’t, they made a pretty penny off of me. LOL

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So that is the first of what will be many BEA/BBC centric posts this week.  In fact, some days you may actually see more than one post pop up in ye olde feed reader!  I plan to spotlight some of the awesome books I picked up, speak to a few issues (line jumping anyone?) I noticed during the main event, and just general chatter.

I’ll end this first recap by encouraging anyone who wasn’t able to go to BEA/BBC this year to start saving your pennies.  It is *totally* worth the trip to meet awesome new people, learn great new information and of course find some fabulous new books to read.