LA Weekend #2: The rest of the weekend.

The Children’s Book Author Breakfast is now a podcast if you want to experience it in all its audio glory:

http://bookexpocast.com/2008/06/03/childrens-book-and-author-breakfast

I’ve started following up on my leads on agents/publishers. I’m not sure why a couple of encouraged me to send in my query when their submission guidelines seem to clearly indicate they don’t take my kind of book. I’ll assume they know something I don’t and send it anyway.

Saturday in LA I overslept after having been awake almost 24 hours the day before. I went to the Children’s Book Dinner with my old boss Friday night and then went to a birthday party where I stayed too long. There was a piglet at the party. Literally.

So Saturday was about hanging out with friends and going to a housewarming BBQ. As usual, I ended up doing most of the actual grilling. It’s not that I’m pushy or controlling about BBQ’s. It’s that so many people throw them without really knowing anything about grilling. I’m happy to step in.

Sunday I worked the show for my old employer, MerryMakers.

Working a booth at a trade show is one of the levels of hell in Dante’s inferno, but as I discovered this weekend, working the both is actually a higher level of hell than walking the show. The day lumbered along slowly, the only highlight being when Bernadette Peters came by the booth to by a Walter the Farting Dog Doll. BERNADETTE PETERS!! I’m amazed I didn’t pass-out, but I held it together. Someday she will have my children, so it’s good we met. She signed a playbill for me once in New York after a performance of Gypsy, but now we’re on speaking terms.


Overall attendance at the show seemed low. Fuel prices being what they are, a lot of people didn’t come from the East Coast. I first heard a tape gun Sunday before noon. Scholastic had its entire booth packed up an hour before the show closed. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a slow convention.