conferences

Texas Bound for the Texas Library Association

I’ll be heading off for Fort Worth the week after next, off to speak at the Texas Library Association’s annual conference. I’m excited for this for a number of reasons. First of all, there’s the obvious “getting a chance to talk to a bunch of librarians.” I might be a tad biased, but librarians are, on the whole, awesome. They’re well-read, open-minded, and fierce supporters of reading and learning. If the world were full of more librarians, it would be a better place. But this is also going to be an in person conference, and that makes me happy for

Conferencing Once Again

I’m heading out to Sunday River this weekend again. Time for another Maine Library Association annual conference. This will be the largest one I’ve ever attended. I’m not sure how big they were back in the 80s and 90s (I’d always heard stories MLA was really booming back then), but we’re at 205 total attendees right now, and that’s well above where we’ve been lately. For reference, in 2014 (the first conference I had anything to do with planning), we just had 143, and that was held in conjunction with the Maine School Library Association. So it’s great to see

Maine Library Association Annual Conference

Another MLA annual conference is in the record books, and I for one am very glad to have emerged from the other side. I go to a fair number of conferences each year, but I only actually take part in running one. This one. And it’s made me appreciate how much work goes into a successful conference. There’s a ton of moving parts, and staying on top of all of them can be dizzying. This year’s conference was a great success, I think. We had a record turnout (183, which was 60 more than we had last year). We were

Salt Lake Comic Con Review

I’m back from my trip to Salt Lake Comic Con, and I’m here to give you all the juicy details. Well, not really. There’s nothing too juicy, but it was a very fun event. I’ve never been to a convention that big (100,000+ people), and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Now that I’ve attended, I’ve seen the main difference is the showroom floor, which was absolutely mobbed, both with vendors and with attendees. I’m not a personal huge fan of big crowds, so a few hours of that was all I could take, but it was interesting sitting up

Salt Lake Comic Con!

With all my vacations and running around, I realized yesterday that I still haven’t officially announced on the blog that I’ll be presenting at Salt Lake Comic Con. NEXT WEEK! That’s right, woodchuck-chuckers, next Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, you can come on out to hear me speak, and I’ll even have some copies of THE MEMORY THIEF to hand out. Free! What am I going to be speaking about? Thursday at 1pm in room 255F, I’ll be on a panel discussing Writing for Teens. Friday at 2pm in room 150G, I’ll be on a panel discussing Writing for Children. Friday