I’m on vacation at San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC), which is definitely the biggest and most epic convention in existence for all things geeky and nerdy! It’s also a great con for book-lovers, because most of the major publishers set up booths and give out free books, ARCs, posters, and other promo material!!

Today (Thursday) was the first full day of the convention, and it was a busy one for me. I attended two book-related panels: “The Modern Fairytale” and “The Scoop at Simon & Schuster”. Check out below for info on the panels, pictures from the con, and other fun information!

The Modern Fairytale panel featured some really incredible authors: (from left-to-right) Tonya Hurley, Naomi Novik, Renee Ahdieh, Julie Kagawa, and Laura Bickle. They had a great discussion about the use of fairytale elements in their novels.

After that, I hit the Expo Hall to scope out the publisher’s booths. There are a lot of great publishers here, including HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Random House, Del Ray, and more! Getting books is a pretty big challenge… there are set times, contests to try for, and secret code words to find. But I think I did pretty well!

I spent a bit of time wandering the convention as well, just taking in the sites. There’s something immensely reassuring about looking around you and realizing that everyone is just as weird as you are!

The last panel of the day was Simon & Schuster’s discussion of their upcoming releases. This was a great chance to jot down some books that I’m going to want to check out this fall… including:

Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings
Alexandra Sirowy’s The Creeping
Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds
Scott Westerfeld’s Zeroes
Tim Floreen’s Willful Machines
Daniel Kraus’ The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch

And that was my day! Tomorrow is day two, so I should get some sleep if I expect to survive it in one piece.