Tuesday morning we started off bright and early on a lovely flight to Orlando. Karina and I got lucky enough to sit next to a girl named Ashley, who also happened to be attending LeakyCon. We also noticed about 4 other people on the plane who were on their way to Hogwarts too. After settling in to the hotel and grabbing some dinner with my lovely roommates, we got a text hinting that registration was going to open that night, so we ventured down to the conference area to find a huge group of people sitting in a giant circle playing games. We stayed down there for about four hours and they did open registration, but that is where the problems began. Things were missing and only certain letters were done and of course mine wasn't one of them. So we went back upstairs to catch a few hours of sleep before waking up at 6am to get back in line for registration.
Now, I'm not going to lie. Wednesday morning sucked. We got downstairs around 6:30am and even though we were pretty much first in line, we were about to go through complete and total chaos. We went from the regular registration line to the Lit Day registration line. Then I got a Lit Day pass, but my regular registration was missing. So I went back to the regular registration line. Found Karen from the HPA. Asked her what to do. She couldn't find my registration and said she would call me when it turned up. In the meantime, it was getting close to 9am and the beginning of Lit Day. Meanwhile, Karina had found out she had been deregistered and was standing in the conflict resolution line, which was slowly but surely getting very very long. I went and stood with her and we met this really awesome couple who we basically ended up seeing everywhere we went (more on that later) and finally around 8:30am we got our registration all nice and fixed. We rushed upstairs to shower and get ready only to find out that Lit Day was being pushed back an hour. By the time we got downstairs, the conflict resolution line was taking over the entire conference area. It was intense. We also met our good friend Adam from Australia that morning. He put us in his video on YouTube:
We're the ones with the awesome socks fyi :)
I know up to this point there has been a lot of detail and if it's boring you, I'm sorry. But now I promise I'm going to get to the fun stuff. Which does not include as much detail.
Let me sum up Lit Day for you. I met a bunch of awesome editors and I learned a lot about publishing. Now for me that was a little odd, because I wasn't expecting to come away with as much as I did. I went in to Lit Day thinking that I would listen to editors talk about their jobs and fantasize about how one day, hopefully one day soon (well after college of course) that that would be me. But I genuinely learned a lot from the panels. I took a ton of notes (which my internship adviser will love I'm sure) and I got to speak to the editor who really stated it all for me, Cheryl Klein. I think I probably scared her a little bit when I went up to her and told her that a conversation with her right before Lumos in 2006 was the moment I realized I wanted to be an editor, but I hope she understood how much that one little conversation meant to me. Hopefully she saw it as flattering instead of creepy. The one thing I will take away the most from those panels was a relationship between an agent and an editor. I never really considered the agent-editor relationship. In my head, it was always about publishing the book. But I realized that it isn't just about the editing and designing and selling. An agent plays a huge role. It was really insightful to listen to agents as well as the editors speaking.
The coolest part of Lit Day was definitely meeting Libba Bray. While she was in the middle of signing my book, I mentioned my friend Nicole from www.wordforteens.com, to which she gleefully replied, "OMG you know Nicole?!?! I love her! How do you know her?" which then proceeded to start a lovely conversation about how we were part of the HPA together and how she went to my school and was one of my closest friends. It was pretty exciting.
Oh yes, I also saw John Green and Maureen Johnson. I love them both.
Wednesday night began the opening festivities, which you've now caught a glimpse of if you watched the video above. There was a video yearbook as well as live performances by Hank Green, Team Starkid, and of course, Harry and the Potters. The Great Hall looked fantastic. It actually felt like Hogwarts.
After the opening festivities, we all headed over to the park for the Open at the Close event. Karina and I didn't end up going on any rides, but we did walk around Hogsmeade and we made the walk through Hogwarts. The coolest part of the night was when we were in line to get on the boat back to the hotel. Chris Rankin and his girlfriend were let on the boat before us and when we got on we ended up sitting next to John Green and Maureen Johnson. Maureen looked exhausted and was just kind of sitting there staring off into space, but I took the opportunity to say hello to John and ask him for a picture. It was the perfect ending for our first night at Hogwarts!
**More to come soon. It's just way too much to talk about in one post.**
Until next time! :)
