There are so many ways in which the past four and a half years of book blogging have changed my reading habits, and so many books and authors I’d never have known without it. Beth Kephart is near the top of that list, and the loss would have been all mine. Despite her prolific and varied output and a National Book Award nomination for her first book, the memoir A Slant of Sun: One Child’s […]
Parts 1 and 2 posted on Monday and Tuesday This is NOT the Doctor! We were up early again on Sunday for the last day of Comic-Con, loading up the car and driving back to the Convention Center, since we’d be heading straight home at the end of the day…but at the beginning, we headed straight for Hall H. Once again, we had a 12:30 panel as our goal, and this was our last chance […]
Part 1 posted yesterday When we couldn’t make it into the room – or even get near the room, really – for any of the panels we’d hoped to see on Thursday or Friday morning, we had to re-think what we wanted to experience at Comic-Con. We also thought about how the Con needs to re-think its approach to crowd management and scheduling. We heard from other attendees that the Convention Center’s huge Hall H, […]
There are many special and unusual things about San Diego Comic-Con International. Not the least among them is that it’s one of the rare places where use of the frequently-derided Comic Sans font is not only accepted, it’s encouraged. However, I will not be using it to write these posts. This was our second time attending Comic-Con, so we didn’t think we were newbies, but we got plenty of surprises. Our first day on-site was […]
This is the last piece of my three-part reflection on conference comparisons. After some consideration of conversations and conference-goers in the previous post, this one gets more personal. * Some people come for the people, and you see them talking with each other, walking around, and eating together. There are also events that go on around a conference that have no association with brands at all. They happen when two or three bloggers meet up […]
This is the second of my three-part reflection on conference comparisons. Yesterday I talked about conversations; today I’m thinking about some of the “accessories” conferences acquire… * Some people come for the swag, and you see them carrying around lots of stuff. There’s been some pretty impressive swag spotted around BlogHer conferences. Some comes from BlogHer sponsor brands, but rumor has it that the really choice stuff turns up at the offsite, invitation-only events that […]
I’ve said it before; I like to look for the connections. On the day I moderated the “Blogging for a Niche Market” panel at the 2011 Book Blogger Convention, I contributed a guest post to Armchair BEA talking about the opposite of niche – the concerns and interests bloggers share regardless of the specific content of their blogs. Despite the fact that it’s being held just down the 5 Freeway in San Diego this year, […]
One of my favorite things at BEA was making introductions between bloggers. I just think it’s rude not to make introductions when someone comes up to join a conversation already in progress; and when I’m introducing one blogger to another, it’s so much fun to see the spark of recognition when they realize that they already do know one another via their writing. And I’m the non-niche book blogger who was asked to moderate the […]
By choice, I didn’t go to very many book signings at BEA 2011, but two of them were pretty special. Joanne Bamberger’s PunditMom was one of the very first blogs I began following, four long years ago, and she’s introduced me to a number of savvy political women online. Our paths have crossed in a number of ways; both of us blogged for sites in the Silicon Valley Moms Group, and we met in person […]
I’m up earlier than I planned to be on a rainy (!?) Sunday morning, back in Southern California. Some thought-out content and pictures related to my week in New York for BEA and BookBloggerCon is coming, but as I am not yet fully coherent, it won’t be in this post. I heard from more experienced BEA-goers that there were far fewer galleys available this year, but since this was my first time, I can’t compare. […]
After last week, I really feel that those who would diss people who use social media to reach out during times of crisis honestly don’t get social media. Those of you who follow my Twitter feed or are Facebook friends are probably aware of the crisis my family experienced last week, and which triggered this not-terribly-original observation. A recap follows, via Facebook updates (most of which were pushed from Twitter, so they’re pretty brief). Starting […]
Image via Wikipedia (If you think you’ve seen this post before, there’s a reason; it did make a brief appearance last week. But it is being re-published today, having been a casualty of the Great Blogger Outage of 2011 on May 12-13. ) You never really notice how used to something you’ve become until it’s not there any more – or as Joni Mitchell put it, “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” […]
