I’m home again…yay!

I’m not a big taker of pictures, so I don’t have a lot to upload, but here’s a few that I’ve found that were taken of me by others, and some pics of some swag I brought home.

This first one is right before the start of the Featured Author Signing Event on Saturday. It was taken on my own phone by the awesome Arshad Ahsanuddin, who had the spot across from me:

This one was taken by Gigi (such a sweetie!) of Gay Book Reviews when I was working the Indie Pub table in the vendor room on Thursday. I snagged it off the Gay Book Reviews site:

This one’s pretty similar to the first one, only taken an hour or so into the Saturday author signing event by Elisa Rainbow (also a sweetie!). I snagged it off Elisa’s Facebook:

Here’s some of the swag I hauled home. I didn’t get that much considering all that was available. I wandered through a couple of the other author lounges, but not all of them (needed some downtime so I could make it through the times when I was “on”). Ari McKay was handing out free copies of Blood Bathory: Like the Night because it was an old version of a book that’s been republished, and I won a copy of Layla Dorine’s Guitars and Cages because I was the first person she spotted wandering around wearing her serpent charm (woot). I was stoked to see there’s a sequel to Laura Baumbach’s Details of the Hunt coming out (Genetic Snare). I reread Details recently and was bemoaning the fact there wasn’t a sequel because it’s such a fun story. All in all, plenty of nifty stuff to sift through and authors/stories to look up. I also picked up a pile (not pictured) of QueeromanceInk and QueerSciFi swag for A.T. Weaver (she requested it at the recent Midwest Writers of LGBTQ Fiction meeting):

All in all I had fun. Doubtful I had the kind of impact that the bubbly extroverted folks get, but I had a reasonable amount of traffic at my author lounges and the big signing event. I haven’t inventoried my swag yet to see how much of each type of item was grabbed (I’ll report on that later), but a quick glance tells me more than a hundred copies of my free short story booklet (Captain Jack and the Snack Attack) got picked up, which isn’t too bad. Still got plenty left of everything for future events. Quite a few folks mentioned that they particularly loved the kind of swag that they would actually use when they got home, so yay, I nailed that with pens, letter openers, and notepads. Rainbow colored silicone bracelets were popular, too.

The times I signed up for things were random since I had no idea what was optimal. Next time I’ll know not to sign up for a reading at 1:30 p.m. since not many folks have trickled back from lunch by then (or who knows, maybe one of the super-popular folks had something going on in another room at the same time). Anyway, I read chapter seven of To Love and To Cherish to all of eight people. A.R. Moler and Neil Plakcy were in the same reading session. I saw that a copy of that same book was sold in the vendor room shortly after…not sure if the timing was coincidental or a result of the reading.

It was lovely meeting so many fellow authors, fans, and potential new readers! ♡