BEA 2014 - I was there Part I! Oh, and a giveaway.

BEA 2014 is now a thing of the past and I've come away with tons of blisters, memories and books. Ah - all of my goals were met. As I am a blogger and a lover of all things bookish, herein lies my obligatory recap post of all the awesomesauce.

I was in NYC for four-and-a-half days of BEA crazy times, and since I have so much to show and tell, I'm splitting it into two posts, EACH with a different giveaway from my BEA book stash. Keep reading to find out what today's giveaway book is!

DAY 1 - Tuesday, May 27

On Tuesday, Jen from At Random and I drove from our casas in Pennsylvania to Secaucus, NJ and took the train in to Penn Station.

After checking in to our hotel, meeting up with roomies, and totally awesome chicks, Anna from Annaberry Reads and Val from Stuck In Books, we took a very sensory-overloaded walk through Times Square to have dinner at Jekyll and Hyde. We met Tabitha from Not Yet Read there too, and despite three of us having some serious jet lag, we had a great time.

After dinner, we went back to the hotel for some much needed rest and prep time for our first day at BEA.

Day 2 - Wednesday, May 28

Wednesday morning, we hoofed it down to the Javits Center to begin our BEA experience at the BEA Bloggers Conference. We ooed and ahed at the banners hung from the ceiling. I was particularly in love with this very large tribute to all things Cassie Clare.

After a hysterically inspiring kick-off speech from Maureen Johnson, we went our separate ways, depending on whether we chose the more "advanced" track or the "beginner" track.

Unfortunately, the tracks that were supposed to be more advanced either seemed more basic or not applicable. There was, oddly, a large amount of time in the afternoon dedicated to vlogging. Now, I have no problem with vlogging. But, when 99% of your audience has a BLOG, and the vloggers on the panels, by their own admission, do no blogging, it sort of makes you scratch your head, no? But, that's neither here nor there. I had lots of time to connect with other bloggers (I finally got to meet Danny from Bewitched Bookworms!), and of course, at the end there were... books. Yeeeeeesssss.

Following the party, Val and I hopped in a cab and went down to the GORGEOUS Woolworth building in the Financial District to visit the Harlequin offices for their Blogger High Tea. Let me tell you - Harlequin really knows how to show a girl a good time. After presenting us with a bag full of wonderful books, we were lead into a large room with delicious tea and snacks. I had the chance to meet several Harlequin authors like Maisey Yates, Tiffany Reisz and Lori Foster. They were so super nice to chat with (I found out that Maisey Yates' anniversary and mine are only two days apart and we have kids the same age!), and they even signed our books!

A funny thing happened as we were leaving. I was peeking in the offices on the way out, and had to stop outside the office of someone who obviously works at HarlequinTEEN because there were tons of books by authors like Kady Cross and Julie Kagawa all over the floor. I said out loud something like, "Wow! Look at all those books by Julie Kagawa! I just want to roll around in them." Our host, the lovely Anna Robinson, started laughing, and when I looked at her, she said that Julie Kagawa was right down the hall. I looked, and there she was! I think I actually fangirl squealed. I KNOW.

After we left Harlequin's offices, we headed back to Midtown to the Fox Sports Lounge in the NewsCorp building for the HarperCollins Blogger Bash. What a party! Val and I spent most of our time chatting with the lovely Cora Carmack. We had a chance to talk about her upcoming new Rusk University novel, All Broke Down, as well as how she feels now with four successful books under her belt. The time passed very quickly.

After all the excitement of the day, we well and truly crashed.

Giveaway

For my first post-BEA giveaway, I'm offering up to US peeps an ARC of THIS SHATTERED WORLD by Ami Kaufman and Meagan Spooner. This is the second book in their Starbound series (These Broken Stars was the first book in the series). Good luck!

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