BEA 2011 - Day Two & Day Three

Day two at BEA and I was kinda grumpy.  It wasn't a bad day, just a long one.
I started my day waiting on line for Melissa Marr's dark fantasy Graveminder, her first adult novel.  The line was crazy long but I expected that (paranormal YA authors are like rock stars at these things), and arrived there about 25 minutes before the signing began. It still ended up taking a 1/2 hour for me to get to the front of the line.  Then I headed over to Harlequin for Victoria Dahl's book, Good Girls Don't.  Would you believe, she ran out of copies two people ahead of me?  Urrgh.  She did give me a magnet as a consolation but I'd rather have had the book.  (I should have gone to the panel on book banning instead.) Oh well.  C'est la vive. 

Later, I ambled over to wait on line for The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.  This book has such an incredible buzz that the line went down the aisle, made a turn, went two more aisles over, turned again and then kept going.  And this was twenty minutes before the signing began!  I spoke with a book buyer from the west coast who said the book was terrific.  He compared it to Geek Love, with Dunn's book being the yin to The Night Circus' yang.  I decided not to wait on line.  I'll buy the book when it comes out in September.    I have so many books in my TBR pile, I probably wouldn't be able to get to it until then anyway.
There were six books I was hoping to get my hands on today but only acquired three of them.  However, I did manage to talk to some folks and find a few books that were not on my radar, including a book of essays on slasher films and a m/m romance at the RWA booth.  So I got that going for me.

I was friggin wiped out when I got home and woke up this morning feeling pretty much the same.  Headed back down to BEA for the 10am signing of Kristin Painter's Blood Rights, a new gothic/vampire series from Orbit that sounds promising.  BEA was much quieter today with a real sense of it winding down.  Strolled past the Mystery Writers of America booth, only to find that they were gone.  Most of the tables in the autograph area were not being used and the general energy of the place seemed subdued.  There was still plenty of action though.  Jane Lynch packed them in over at the Uptown Stage and Tony Hawk had a long line of fans excited to get his autograph at the Capstone booth.
I left by 11:30am and was home by noon.  The book blogger reception is this afternoon from 3pm-5pm but I'm going to pass.  The BBC starts early tomorrow (8:45am!!!) and I want to be well rested and alert for that.  BEA 2011 was fun and I'm glad I went. Would I go again?  Probably.  But next time, I think I'll streamline my approach even more.  It's awful easy to get sucked into the whole oh-my-god-free-books and start accepting them left and right.  When it comes down to it, who cares if it's free if I am not interested in reading it.