Post-BEA Bump & Slump

I was in an exhausted, happy whirl Monday thru Wednesday, writing & answering a flurry of follow-up email, making & taking phone calls, coming up with Bright Ideas for next year's VaBook Festival.

During all of which I was doing my final School Mom duties--dinner for 8 on Tuesday for local master debaters and their coaches, including the Boy Wonder; buying cakes (I bailed on baking any) and organizing kids for the speech team fundraiser last night in the offices of a posh Denver legal firm. BW and 8 others from his school are going to the National Forensic League championships in fabulous Wichita in two weeks--a 9-hour van ride across endless dull flatness. Better them than me.

One of my workshop alums, whom I met with at BookExpo and steered to a publicist and media trainer, made my day--maybe my week--yesterday by sending me a gorgeous bouquet of roses in a deep ruby-red vase. The ensemble matches the downstairs decor so well you'd think it had been Designed.

Also during BEA, I had lunch with a consulting client, a debut author whom I'd never met face to face. She has a radio tour coming up and I strongly recommended that she get media training. Subsequently I chatted with one of her book's publicists at their booth, then late Monday I got an email from the head pub. After a round of emails and phone calls with the author, her agent, the media trainer and the pub, her publisher is going to go 50-50 with her on media training via phone. Everybody wins; I felt like such a fixer!

And now I'm down and out with a sore throat and jammed sinuses. The good news is that I'm going to bed with an ARC of client Kim Reid's memoir of growing up in the midst of the Atlanta child murders, NO PLACE SAFE. I was high on this book as soon as Kim told me about it; I'm even higher now that I'm reading it.