Anna Staniszewski

First, just a reminder that today is your last chance to enter my New Year Book Giveaway! If you want to win some free books, you only have until midnight tonight to enter!

Also, check out the fancy new search feature on the right-hand side of the page. A big thank you to my husband for making it happen.

Okay, now on to my recap of this weekend. I’d never been to ALA (Midwinter or otherwise) before, so I was in for a treat. There were books, and people excited about books, and more books, books, books! I was tempted to go crazy and grab every ARC I could get my hands on, but in the end I exercised extreme self-control. I did get one ARC, though, that made me jump up and down:

The best part of the day was getting to see people I’d only “met” online. I went out to lunch with a few members of the Enchanted Inkpot (aka Inkies). We went to the Legal Test Kitchen (which was great!) and chatted about everything from writing, to reading, to rabbits. Of course, I forgot to bring a camera, but here’s a picture I shamelessly stole from Nandini’s blog:

From left to right, that’s me, librarian Sarah Chessman, YA/MG author Deva Fagan, YA author Ellen Booream, YA author Alisa Libby, YA author Marissa Doyle, and hopefully-soon-to-be-published Nandini Bajpai. For more pictures, check out Nandini’s ALA post.

After wandering the exhibits and running into some of my lovely former students, I headed over to the ALA Tweetup. It was so much fun to finally meet the people behind the tweets. How often do you get to be completely surrounded by folks whose interests are almost identical to your own? It was pretty amazing.

At the end of the evening, I went home exhausted, excited, and a bit overwhelmed. There are SO many books out there, and more come out every month. It’s impossible to read all the ones that interest you; there aren’t enough hours in the day. Also, it’s humbling to be reminded of how difficult it is to make your work stand out once it’s published. It doesn’t necessarily mean your book isn’t amazing; there’s just a lot of competition out there. I suppose that means you have to try that much harder, and to keep writing for no other reason than because you simply love doing it.