June Flashback: Meeting Evangeline Lilly and My Time at BookCon 2019

Meeting Evangeline Lilly

& My Time at BookCon 2019

Saturday, June 1st was my third year in a row attending BookCon in NYC! For those of you who don’t know what attending BookCon is like it’s an all day booktastic geeky extravaganza with small businesses and independent artists hawking their wares. (Support them! It matters!)

Like these pop culture icon votive candles!

Imma give you a run down about what Book Con is like (if you've never been) as I share what it was like to attend again this year. Sure, this post is well, erm...late, but as a blogger acquaintance of mine once said, "I have nothing to prove to you." And as one of my favorite podcasters says, "time schmime. Or something like that. 

SO. Along with vendor and merch goodness Book Con features a plethora of panels with topics ranging from Oh, The Horror! A Conversation with Modern Day Horror Authors,  Read With Pride, celebrating young adult (YA)  books with LGBTQ characters, an all-women panel discussing the Must Read Graphic Novels they’ve created. (Yup, the superhero comics boys club has finally given us women our own space to do our visual storytelling thaaang. There’s room for all of us here!)  

There are publishers enticing bookworms to sign up for newsletters and buy every book in sight  in order to be entered to win squee worthy prize packs. There are flurries of ARC, tote bag, pin, and other swag drops every hour.

But, don’t bank on skipping out of BookCon onto the New York streets at the end of the day with a Santa Claus sack crammed with goodies. Truth bomb: many of those hauls you see booktubers and bookstagrammers boasting about are unrealistic AF. No shade, buuuuuut they often have their parents, extra friends, or, erm minions as one book reviewer confessed, wait in lines for them, get extra autographs for them, and strategically appear at the drop spots.  

This was my instant reaction to the Wraith (aka undead evil chauffeur) whispering to me, "I'm going to steal your soul tonight." 

For those of us who aren’t, well, them, time is way too limited and lines are far too long for you to be able to see and do everything. Which is why I have to insist: BE 👏🏻 SPON 👏🏻TAN 👏🏻EOUS 👏🏻 LADYBROS! 👏🏻 Don’t set you sweet, precious, little heart on following an … *shudders* Itinerary (says a girl still haunted by traumatically enforced timetables in vacations of family past.)  Plan ahead if you want, sure! But there will be tears if your too high hopes are dashed. *whispers* all. the. tears.

You have to be flexible. Like this guy!

ANYWAYS-- B-b-b-back to BookCon!

The Javits center is peppered with bookish photo-op spots celebrating childhood favourites like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the animated Netflix original She-Ra, and for the #adulting crowd a sliver of the new AMC series NOS4A2’s wicked Christmasland.

Book signings abound (FYI: many of them ticketed and requiring purchases though!), and if you’re one of the fortunate few readers with the foresight to plan ahead, like, way ahead, you could even get up close and personal with big league authors, like Leigh Bardugo and Marie Lu at exclusive meet and greets!

BookCon is a chaotic, geeky, mosh pit of bibliophiles hyperventilating over the enormity of it all. Certified introverts be warned, BookCon is an all consuming multisensory experience, and well, for lack of a better term, a serious dose of exposure therapy. Nothing like sprawling crowds of other rabid fans to rip off the shyness bandaid amiright?

On the other hand, extraverts like me can frolic around babbling gleefully to a captive audience in lines (of which there are many) about the merits of FEMALE FRIENDSHIPS IN MIDDLE GRADE NOVELS and tell dad jokes that no one thinks are funny.   

The lines are real.  The lines are unmoving, impenetrable. There’s no getting away from me and all the other me's swarming the scene.                

And you just might bump into your favorite author roaming the showroom floors.

Yup. Even foolish mortals can be photobombed by Joe Hill, then see him jump right in front of you to pose with the demonic child outside his NOS4A2 photo experience. I saw him. I recognized him. My jaw dropped. He was within my grasp. I lunged into them once the fans finished capturing the moment on their phones, by did crying out HEY HEY CAN I GET IN THERE? WITH YOU? BOTH OF YOU?  Don’t worry about being creepy and weird. Don’t worry about being annoying. Just. BEEEE.

You might just end up not only meeting and touching the elbow of Joe Hill and a delightful monster child. But getting a PICTURE to forever to commemorate meeting Joe freaking Hill and the delightful monster child.

Part II. Meeting Evangeline Lilly

Confession: I signed up for Evangeline Lilly’s autographing before I even knew about her series of playfully dark poetry books The Squickerwonkers. Why? Because she’s a majestic land mermaid and I wanted to get her autograph. There. I said it. 

The thing about author signings at Book Con is that although spots are limited, the wait is still HELLA LONG. Aaannnddd authors can decide to leave whenever they want. Yarly. So don’t be like Harry and Ron scampering into Transfiguration fifteen minutes after the start of class. It could mean the difference between seeing your favorite author (or elfen warrior babe) up close, and being turned away and left to drown your sorrows in an overpriced venti tea from Starbucks. 

SO. I was there. Early. I put my patient Hufflepuff training into action while waiting in Evangeline Lilly’s neverending autographing line and I drank in my surroundings (and my lukewarm spring water). Think, a rainbow of tee shirts of all cuts and colors boasting slogans like “my weekend is all booked”, “don’t judge a book by its movie”, “be true to your shelf”, and for classic lit lovers like the tall, brown-haired girl sporting the Catcher in The Rye shirt: “Holden Caulfield thinks you’re a phony”. 

Unlike many ComicCons, BookCon isn’t really a costumed event. Instead, the look ranges from dorky and proud, casually geeky, geek chic, Potterhead, and bibliophile. Muggles and no-majs need not enter our sacred domain. 

Expect to see oodles of tees, dresses, skirts, pins, and other accessories from the stores that hold many of our fandom loving hearts--Hot Topic, Box Lunch, and Out of Print. So if you’re attending BookCon for the first time or the fifteenth, get hyped for a fandom extravaganza of wearable merch not only being sold on the showroom floor, but being modeled by con attendees. If I wasn’t too afraid of dropping my phone in the crush of people and cracking its screen I would’ve taken mad pictures, yo. The better to spam you with! But, not trusting my butterfingers and once again cursing dresses for not having pockets (a sin right up there with dog earring the pages of library books) I only took photos of my personal favorite finds! One of them? 

Before I bonded with the pale-eyebrowed blond girl in front of me these were the thoughts that went through my head before I met Evangeline Lilly:

• I’m a weird bag lady. I’m a weird bag lady. Why do I have so many bags! Why didn’t I know backpacks were allowed? WHY? MY BACKPACK WOULD’VE PREVENTED THIS BAG LADY CATASTROPHE. 
• Wow, Evangeline is right there when she signs our book! THIS. This is why I didn’t bring hummus and carrot sticks, I don’t need to be blasting this goddess on earth’s face with my blended chickpea breath. 
• Her hair is gorgeous. Her smile is gorgeous. Her face is gorgeous. Gorgeous. Gorgeous. Gorgeous.
• I am a donkey. 
• I can’t make a fool of myself like I did when I met Jacqueline Woodson. I was so red. My face! It didn’t work! My words they didn’t work! 

Then I got out of my head and socialized. Firing off podcast recommendations, sharing Stephen King tweets, and bonding with my new bff. A 30-year-old YA book fan who still uses a flip phone (#impressed) and was getting Evangelline Lilly’s book signed for her 11-year-old sister Amelia. In our fervent conversation about GoT’s ghastly ending, annoying romance tropes in YA books, and our mutual hatred of Cassandra Clare’s books (say what you will, but just as there’s magic in bonding over beloved authors, there’s also that spark in bonding over authors who are popular AF and worshipped but whose books we DESPISE, especially because we’re in the minority) we struck early friendship gold!

Then after her book was signed My-Sister-Amelia left without a word. Swallowed up by the book loving hoardes, and sanitized off Evangeline’s hands with a hearty dose of purell. 

My new bff, My-Sister-Amelia, had ditched me.

For books.

I grieved. I grieved like I'd never grieved bef-- THENITWASMYTURN. My-Sister-Whats-Her-Name a mere star in a constellation in the night sky of my mind. In in a blink the chick from Lost, Tauriel, Hope Van Dyne, Evangeline was in front of me. And I totally kept my cool. Really. Even when she looked at me with instant recognition in her eyes and asked me four words that have still stuck with me today, “Have we met before?” then another four, “You look so familiar”.

DEad. So deAD.

Seeing an actressperson I admire so much inches away from me, brighten up, and seem to know me was like being zapped with a bolt of magic. Happy mystical unicorn magic. I fired off a few quips (“Maybe you’ve seen me on Twitter! I’m there a lot!”) and self-deprecating bag comments (vegan lunch and water, ayeee) and frolicked away, signed book in tow.

Which actually gives me a perf segue into the next piece of Book Con advice. 

One of my biggest tips, aside from the be flexible like a wacky waving inflatable tube man, and be spontaneous, are the following: 

Pack snacks and drinks. 

The more portable the better.

The Javits Center Starbucks lines can be longer than author signings, and the greasy cafeteria food is the price of your unborn first child. And their lines are longer and more agonizing than you’d be in labor for when birthing said first child. 

I brought a vegan kale salad, apples, a bag of nut mix I DIY’d, and my Trader Joe’s almond butter cocoa oat bar along with two water bottles with enough fluid in them to hydrate a horse. (WATER IN THE CITY IS EXPENSIVE). 

Book Con 2019 was, overall, brilliant. My heart still hurts when I think about how one of my best friend’s, and Book Con partner, wasn’t able to make it this year (ilu, Sid!) and it wasn’t even remotely the same without here there by my side fangirling with me and squeeing over all the books and merch being sold, but it was still a hell of a good time. 

I walked away, believe it or not,with an arc of a book I desperately wanted months ago just because I happened to be at the right place at the right time as the publishers were packing up for the night. It wasn’t advertised in any of the Con flyers and I didn’t even vaguely imagine it might be there. 

Book magic. It’s real, people. As are the sparkly memories that Book Con 2019 left with me with.

Did you attend Book Con 2019? Or have you attended any bookish Cons local to you?