Day 1 YALC | Fantasy and Freebies

So, Day 1 at YALC! 

For anyone who doesn’t know, YALC is the Young Adult Literature Convention and it’s running for three days.

It was a pretty good, pretty eventful day. By eventful, I mean I was fighting off a migraine all day, but brownies helped (trust me on this one).

Anyway, enough of that. What happened? Well, let’s start with what I got.

Books and Freebies galore!

The books I got today were:

• The City of Mirrors, the final instalment in Justin Cronin’s excellent The Passage trilogy, which also has a RRP of £20 but I got it for £10!
• Nevernight by Jay Kristoff which I am super super excited to read, especially after just finishing Illuminae and loving it.
• A Darker Shade of Magic by VE Schwab which I also got signed! (She was lovely, btw).
• An ARC of Girl Detached by Manuela Salvi. This book has been banned in Italy but the publishers here in the UK, Barrington Stoke, are really pushing for Salvi’s voice to be heard which is great! This is also my first ever ARC which makes me very happy.

And then also tons of freebies, as you can see. I basically raided every stall for samples and postcards and anything that wasn’t nailed down. The publishers’ stalls are all really friendly and stocked with some amazing stuff.

Now, what about the panels?

Today I saw:

• 15 mins of Behind the Magic: Magical Systems in YA with Sally Green, Taran Matharu, Melinda Salisbury and VE Schwab before I felt a migraine coming on and had to leave, so thanks for that brain, but what I heard was good.
• ‘She who laughs last laughs the laughiest’: humour in YA with Katy Birchall, Nat Luurtsema, Jenny McLachlan and Holly Smale. This panel was sooooo funny and the authors made some great feminist (and funny) points on the place of women comic writers in the book scene.
• I then had an Agent 1-2-1, which was only 5 mins, but really insightful actually and got some good advice from Claire Wilson from Rogers, Coleridge and Wright literary agency on the novel I’m writing. 
• Fantasy London with Ben Aaronovitch, Samantha Shannon and VE Schwab. This was a really interesting talk, especially as I love the idea of alternate realities, mainly alternate London’s. Ben Aaronovitch was also very funny and I’m definitely going to check out his books now.
• VE Schwab’s signing which had an exceedingly long queue. Thankfully, I wasn’t too far from the front.

The rest of the time was spent browsing the stalls and, um, eating (the cafe does really good brownies btw).

I didn’t attend any workshops today but I’m definitely going to sign up for one or two tomorrow.

There are also so so so many more books I wish I could get but I simply can’t afford them, so I had to limit myself to the few I really wanted.

And that concludes day 1 of YALC! I’ll be doing posts for the next two days and then a big wrap up post at the end! Did you go today? Did you enjoy it? What was your favourite panel talk or workshop? Did you buy any books? Let me know in the comments below!

 

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