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I’m back! It has been an amazing week of traveling!

First up, BookExpo America–I woke up on May 31st at 4:30 AM for my 6 o’clock flight, but I wasn’t a bit tired–I think I was being super hyper or something. And then the whirlwind of the convention took me up. The place was so huge, and there were so many people. I met amazing authors–namely, the Young Adult authors I had been following for a bit of time: Erin Bowman, Sarah J. Maas, Susan Dennard, and Kat Zhang!

This is them! I am second from the right (Sarah wasn’t pictured.) 
I also met Robyn Schneider, whom I long admired, and was super sweet. 
But best of all, I met Grant Faulkner,the director of Nanowrimo–and I think I was kind of fangirling (which, by the way, Blogger wanted to correct to fang idling–which doesn’t make any more sense). He was amazing. Being the nice and humble person he was, he agreed to take a picture with me, and when I told him how much Nanowrimo had helped me, he seemed to be surprised and happy at the same time. 

After my two-day explosion of BEA had ended, my dad and I went down to Baltimore, and then to Philadelphia to meet author Andi Buchanan!
I emailed Andi back when I was 9, and her Daring Book for Girls book had come out. Eventually, we established a great friendship over email, where she is a brilliant mentor and we talk about books and writing and piano–I have been learning it for a long time, and Andi herself was once a concert pianist. And 5 years later, I was so incredibly glad to finally meet her!

And then there was the stack of books that I acquired. I think the picture speaks for itself. 

I just have to get through them all…

But I cannot express in words how INSPIRING this trip was–to connect with industry professionals, to meet the authors I wanted to meet for a long time, to tell them thank you. 
I wasn’t sure about this trip, because I wasn’t anywhere in the industry yet–after all, I still was an unknown writer. But BEA went above and beyond all my expectations, and I returned with a suitcase of books and a heart literally bursting with the energy and inspiration–just what I need for the next stages of my writing. 
Speaking of which, I will have another post up shortly, about the ongoing journey into Revisionland. 

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Hi! Today was a Saturday, and although I didn’t do the 10k words as promised, I did about 3.5k.
Here’s what I’m reading this month:
River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh


This is a book I got in China (but it’s a British book) and it chronicles the opium drug trade, and many lives that intertwined in the busy ports of Canton—and what happened when a man named Commissioner Lin stepped up to abolish the opium from China forever. It is related to the topic of my novel, and I do love the descriptions, but it is incredibly dense and it takes me a lot of work to get through it. But the cover! I think that is the most beautiful cover I have ever seen.

The Night Circus by Erin. Morgenstern

Funny story–about 9 months ago, my family was preparing to go to South Korea (on a connecting flight to Bali, our actual destination.)  In the O’Hare airport, I saw a copy of The Night Circus–and I wanted to buy it, because, well, the story sounded intriguing and the characters and oh!– the cover was beautiful.
But it was an airport bookstore. And airport books are really expensive.
Now, a year later, I am reading it now, and I wish I had bought it nine months ago. No matter the price, it wouldn’t have paid enough for the beautiful, illustrious descriptions, the mystery, the intrigue of the circus.
(Okay, you get this blog post’s theme now–descriptions and book covers)
Plus, Erin Morgenstrn has done NaNoWriMo (The Night Circus was her Nano novel) and I love her pep talk.
And on her blog, in the archives, I stumbled upon a quote she had read;
“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
Beautiful.