Kidlit Conference '08: Part II

Sheesh, it's so much later than I was hoping to post this. I don't know where the time goes. And before I start, I just want to say that you should head over to the Cybils blog bright and early tomorrow and get nominatin'!

So I realized that I forgot an important part of my conference day in my post yesterday. I had a fairly quiet start to the morning, sitting down to breakfast in the hotel restaurant; there weren't many people in the section where the hostess seated me, and I had brought my notes for the Cybils panel to peer at over coffee. Soon, I was joined by Greg Pincus of GottaBook, whom I'd met at the 2007 SCBWI summer conference; not long after that, we were joined by a few more, and soon it was a friendly and lively affair, and a nice start to the day. I just wanted to point that out.

Anyway, when I last left off, we'd just enjoyed the second keynote panel with Colleen and Jackie. After that, we all adjourned to one of two offerings: one for beginning bloggers and one for intermediate/advanced bloggers. I attended the latter: Kick Your Blog Up a Notch with Pam Coughlan, aka MotherReader. Now, there's no drawing of MotherReader, simply because she was so animated and lively and funny that my doodling just couldn't keep up. If you're familiar with her TEOTF article "Be a B-List Blogger," this was the live version, updated for 2008, with a healthy bonus dose of the funny.

Then...well, then it was time for the Cybils session. I had to miss Mark Blevis' session on podcasting, but I had the wonderful privilege of being part of a panel with Jen Robinson (whom I met in person for the first time earlier that day--which is silly, because we only live about an hour and a half away from each other) and Jackie Parker. We talked about how the Cybils work, and got a lot of great questions and suggestions, and we even had a nice conversation with Philip Lee--yes, the Lee of Lee & Low Books, who also joined us for lunch--"us" being MotherReader, Jackie, Colleen, Jen, Anastasia Suen, and me. Philip was so wonderful and so interested in all of us bloggers, and he donated a ton of excellent prizes for the raffle, too. I'm now proudly sporting a button that says "Yes We Can: A Biography of Barack Obama." But I'm getting ahead of myself. Check back for Part 3!