I forgot to mention a happy accident from Friday – a random meeting with Lynn Weingarten in someone else’s signing line (how sad that I can’t remember whose? Ally Carter’s, maybe?). Lynn is the author of WHEREVER NINA LIES, a book I read last year before I was really posting here yet. I really liked it, though, so I’ll point you to the Book Muncher’s excellent review of same. Lynn was delightful and wearing a super cute dress. I love random meetings!

Also, despite being at the same event, I never got to meet Jessica Burkhart, and despite many visits to the Harper booth, I never ran into Molly O’Neill. Those were the two biggest disappointments of the conference!

Okay! So I was joined late Friday night by Patti and Elizabeth, both who had travel mishaps of one variety or another (although Patti’s were much, much worse). After far too little sleep (four and a half hours for me for the second night in a row, and they weren’t consecutive) we were up and headed back to Javits. My back and legs? Still tired from the day before. It is HARD to do the whole weekend!

We started the day upstairs, because I hadn’t done much up there at all on Friday. Picked up some galleys and giveaways for the summer reading program. (My thoughts on BEA the show and what was on display will be for another post entirely.) And then we just started hopping from downstairs to upstairs and back.  The whole day is sort of a blur. I had a great explanation of Moleskine products and a useful visit to the Dover booth. I tried unsuccessfully to buy a sample shirt from Wonder Shirts (Molly will just have to wait for her Knuffle Bunny shirt a little longer). (Just to be clear, I didn’t expect them to sell me their only sample, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask! Their “no” was very nice!) I got books signed by a very charming Mark Teague and an absolutely lovely Gabrielle Zevin.

AND I got books signed for Greg by (among others) George Pelacanos…and James Ellroy.

Hoo, James Ellroy.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hi! Can you sign this for my husband Greg?”

Ellroy rolls his eyes. “Just goes to figure that the hottest woman through my line so far is married.”

Okay, here we go – here’s the famous Ellroy in public!

He then goes on to propose that we have an affair. I point out that the convention is filled with single women; he informs me that he prefers married women. “Well, you are my husband’s favorite author, so maybe he wouldn’t mind,” I tell him, as Patti and Elizabeth are practically rolling on the floor and the rest of the line is looking on in…horror? jealousy? hilarity? amazement? “But he’s a really nice guy, so I probably wouldn’t do that.”

“Oh, I know just what kind of guy he is!” booms Ellroy, and proceeds to write (and read aloud, as he’s writing) something completely offensive and foul and hilarious in Greg’s galley. SO foul (and loud) that a Random House rep sidles up to him and whispers something, and we heard Ellroy mutter “yeah, I know, keep it down, move it along.” He lets me go with further statements about finding him on Facebook, especially if I change my mind, and, practically peeing ourselves with laughter and shaking our heads in complete disbelief, we walk away to let someone else get the full-on Ellroy experience.

“Did that just happen? That just happened,” I must have said ten times in the next two minutes.

Greg has never met James Ellroy, and is dying to, but as I told him yesterday I am glad he didn’t, because that never would have happened if he had. AND he never would have gotten the galley signature that he did, which is one-of-a-kind to say the very, very least.

(I can’t repeat it here. This is a blog about kids’ books. If you want to know what the galley says, email me.)

After the Ellroy Experience everything else is much…quieter. Thanks to a tip from the man in front of us in the Ellroy line we met Amber Tamblyn, who was signing her poetry chapbook a couple of aisles over. (I got one for you, Eliza! She wrote something very cute in it!) I spent a lot of time talking to my friend Sue, who’s a rep at Scholastic, and I got to meet Paul from Simon and Schuster who makes sure I get the books I want to read. I skipped a lot of signing lines on Saturday, especially if I had already picked up the galley.

I didn’t meet very many booksellers, which was a shame – I spent more time on the sales floor and not a lot of time in the special events. But I did meet publicists and editors and authors and sales reps and gave out a lot of cards, so hopefully that helped Pudd’nHead get its name out there so we can start to draw more authors to our shop. I walked and walked and walked and walked, and think I budgeted my time well. Finally on Saturday at 4:30 we went to the shipping area where I paid a lot of money to ship home 85 pounds of books, and we got on the shuttle and went back to the Marriott, having decided that coming on Sunday wasn’t necessary.

My friend Kymm came to the show as well, and she’ll be joining us here at Kidliterate soon. I’ll introduce her as soon as she has a review ready to go!

The rest of the time in NY (til Sunday at 2:30, when I headed off to the airport with Nikki) was spent eating at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame; walking right past the Obama’s date night and thinking that the reason all the cops were there was that a funeral was going on; eating cupcakes and drinking prosecco at Sweet Revenge; finally getting a full seven and a half hours sleep; walking across the Brooklyn Bridge on a beautiful day with my best friend; eating dim sum at Red Egg; eating Pinkberry.

Last night I went to bed at 11:30, woke up at 8:30, and then fell asleep again around 10 and slept for another hour and a half. I feel almost human. The weekend kicked my butt, but it was worth it.

Thoughts on BEA itself (displays, publisher presence, event scheduling, offerings etc) to come hopefully later.