Work(s) In Progress

Having spent Friday and Saturday at the SD Festival of Books in Sioux Falls, I feel like I should be writing a whole bunch about the experience.

In fact, in my mind, there is this whole set of blog posts about what I did during the 28 hours that I was at the Festival. You know... Seeing people. Listening to cool talks. Learnin' stuff.

And I will. Over the next few days, I'll go into all of that. I'll get all fanboy geeky about meeting a couple of people, and try to explain an epiphany or two that I had.

Right now, though, I kinda want to just absorb it for a bit longer.

It's weird, you know. I work with books every day. I see manuscripts come in, and I see real books go out. And, yes, I also spend time working with authors. Not as much as working with their books, but it kind of stands to reason that every manuscript has an author (and many have more than one author), so working with one means I'm working with the other.

But being at the book festival, with all kinds of authors - published and unpublished - and all kinds of readers - academic, casual, professional, and even beginning - was really fun. It reminded me of why I like to work with books. And why I (usually - not always, but usually) enjoy working with other people who like to work with books.

So I guess this is your fair warning that I'm going to be blogging about the book festival for a few days. Don't worry. I'll be changing a few names to protect some of the innocent, and I'll keep some stories to myself to protect some egos (mine, included). I suspect that only Christopher will get all the unexpurgated stories. (Whether he wants them or not... Sorry, hon.) The rest of you will just have to deal with my usual level of "being private in public" storytelling. (Or we'll at least have to go out for drinks, first...)

(By the way... if you're reading my blog for the first time, you might want to know that I post ever-other day. So the next installment will be on Tuesday. See you then!)