Recap: 2nd Annual Ontario Blog Squad Meet-Up

Guys, I can't begin to tell you how much fun this meet-up was. Imagine your favourite thing, ok? (I bet it's probably books if you're reading this blog) Then imagine getting together with over 70 people who have the same favourite thing. Pure awesomeness, I tell you.

The lovely ladies in the Ontario Blog Squad hosted this fabulous event last Saturday for all of the book bloggers in Ontario. I signed up almost as soon as I heard about the event because I wanted the chance to meet some of my fellow book bloggers in person. It turns out a ton of other folks felt the same way because there were SO many people there! So many, in fact, that I wasn't able to talk to nearly as many people as I would have liked!

Let's back up a bit...the morning of the event I posted on my blog's Facebook page that I was off to the event.and the fabulous Natalie from Browsing Bookshelves commented that she was going as well. I knew that we lived in the same city so we ended up agreeing to meet at the GO station and we headed into the big city together. Once we got to Union we met up with Andrea from Cozy Up With A Good Read and Anum from Paper Wings and Ink and walked down to the pub. Thank goodness the rain had stopped by Saturday!

As soon as we walked in we were greeted by the ladies of the blog squad. Michele from Just a Lil' Lost checked us in, Angel from Mermaid Visions gave us our nametags (with our names, blog names, and Twitter handles on them), and Wendy handed out the largest and heaviest swag bags ever. I think most of us resisted the urge to peek until we got home or on the train which resulted in not getting a book signed by one of the authors who was there! Ah well, such is life.

Speaking of authors, there were quite a few of them there! In full disclosure, I'm just going to go right ahead and copy and paste the list from the blog squad site :) The authors were Lesley Livingston (author of Starling), Allison Baggio (author of In The Body), Brian Francis (author of Natural Order), Grace O'Connell (author of Magnified World), Susin Nielsen (author of The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen), Elizabeth Miles (author of Envy), Maureen McGowen (author of Deviants), Joanne Levy (author of Small Medium at Large), and Cinda Williams Chima (author of The Crimson Crown). I got to meet a few of them which was really neat. I admit that I hadn't heard of many of the authors since they mostly write YA and that's not really my thing, but it's always cool to meet authors in person.

Since we were meeting in a restaurant the group I was with picked a table and then just ended up staying there. We wanted to mingle but at the same time our table was having a great conversation! I was sitting with Natalie, Anum, Dee from Editorial Eyes, and Farah from Broken Penguins. As part of the event we were served a tasty lunch and our table was the last one to be served for every course. This wasn't an issue at all since it gave us more time to chat without food in our mouths! We even had time to come up with a table joke - we said that we were District 13 since it seemed like we were forgotten about! :)

District 13
From left: Me, Anum, Dee, author Elizabeth Miles, Farah, and Natalie

Not only do I wish that I had had more of a chance to talk to some of the other bloggers but also the ladies from the publishing houses. It was great to see Lindsey again from Random House and it was fabulous to meet Shannon from HarperCollins (she's been helping me out with a publishing course project).

There were some trivia questions (one of which yours truly got right, thank you Sarah Dessen!) and a raffle (I won two more books from that, too!). We all also got a copy of Envy by Elizabeth Miles and she signed each and every one of them. She was such a sweetie!

Natalie and I had to sneak out early so we could catch our train to get back to Burlington so we missed out on a bit more mingling and chatting time. We were barely seated on the train before we started digging into our bags of goodies!

My favourite thing about the event? Being able to talk to fellow booklovers for hours. I was on a high for the rest of the night! So, a huge thank you to the organizers for putting on this fabulous event. I'm so glad I decided to attend. It was so much fun to spend some time with people who have the same passion I do. 

TL: books in the swag bag TR: the non-book goodies
BL: my signed copy of Envy BR: books I won/got at our table