Attention: Rumors of my death have been-- well, pretty much true *lol* Unfortunately, I've been writing an awful lot of code and not much of anything else (as the one or two people trying to follow Fun With Dick & Shame can tell you >.>) I have something maybe kind of cool in that regard coming up soon, but that's a subject for another blog post.

This week was a strange one for me. Book Expo America was in town. Two years ago I was working in publishing running a technical services company. BEA was the best part of year both as a book lover and as a would-be entrepreneur. There's plenty of networking, parties, drinking, deals, and of course books ... OMG THE BOOKS! BEA is like freebie central: hundreds of unreleased ARCs! People can and often do come back with back-breaking bags full of new reads.

The publishing industry, on the other hand, was not always such a pleasant place. Not long after my last BEA I reached my peak frustration level and decided to close up shop. There were so many great opportunities out there to make much more money banging my head against a lot fewer walls. I felt ready to go explore other paths before work completely destroyed my love of books. For the sake of my continued happiness and sanity I decided two things: that I was done with being an entrepreneur, and that I was done working in publishing.

So what am I doing right now? Running my own business. Who ends up signing on as our first major customer? One of the Big Six publishing houses.

Being back at BEA is weird.

I mean ... it was GOOD weird! I kept running into people I knew. In an exhibit hall filled with thousands of people I couldn't go more than five feet without someone flagging me down. I ran into one person who was providing the same service to magazines that I was trying to provide publishers. Since I closed down his company has now moved into the space and it felt good to have someone go "OMG you were so right, I completely understand why you left" but even better to know that he's been able to make some more progress, that progress was possible for people who were willing to stick it out.

On the M/M side I ran into Kate McMurray and met Michael Murphy at the DSP booth. DSP is the only M/M publisher that has a booth at BEA and while they still had their disgusting free lip gloss, they also had free paperback copies of their books (!!!)

I made a promise to myself in returning to BEA: I was only doing the one day we were required to be there and I was only going to come home with one or two books .... but a table of free M/M??? I was not expecting a table of free M/M books @___@

And as is usual for BEA, the next day I looked over my haul and wondered what the odds were that I would actually bother to READ any of these. Here's what's sitting on my floor:

Little Squirrels Can Climb Tall Trees
Delsyn's Blues
Freefall

If you'd like any of these, let me know. I'll be happy to pass them along :D