{"id":861,"date":"2014-06-03T15:20:06","date_gmt":"2014-06-03T20:20:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rachelhorwitz.com\/blog\/?p=861"},"modified":"2014-06-03T20:08:47","modified_gmt":"2014-06-04T01:08:47","slug":"the-beast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rachelhorwitz.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/03\/the-beast\/","title":{"rendered":"The BEAst"},"content":{"rendered":"

A year ago I was staring at twitter with ginormous envy at all the people attending BEA. Envy so large that I, as a Bostonian,\u00a0fondly named it my Green Monstah.\u00a0The Green Monstah in my belly thought it sounded like such a great experience. Meeting industry\u00a0peeps, other writers, getting books!!\u00a0And I wasn’t there. Living through the tweets of others wasn’t enough. So, Green Monstah started poking at my brain. “Go next year,” it said. “Promise yourself you will go next year!”<\/p>\n

And so I did. I promised myself.<\/p>\n

I bought my flights and got a room with some of my favorite writerly people.<\/p>\n

\"089\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Together we planned such great adventures such as touring\u00a0the convention, hanging around the city and best places to eat. As I arrived I was filled with excitement and joy and….TERRIFYING FEAR. In a matter of moments, BEA had gone from the best….to the BEAst!!<\/p>\n

Did I bring the right clothes to wear?<\/p>\n

What if no one recognized me?<\/p>\n

What if I made a fool of myself?<\/p>\n

How could I speak words to people I idolized?<\/p>\n

Could I locate the nearest table to hide beneath?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But as Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Do something everyday that scares you.” BEA was definitely intimidating and so was the thought of meeting different agents, editors and writers. But I am\u00a0SO glad that I took a deep breath (read: one hundred hyperventilating breaths) and put myself out there. \"076\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"075\"<\/a>The convention floor was super busy and packed with all sorts of people. I bumped into several awesome\u00a0writers from twitter, picked up a ton of great ARCs and put actual human faces to the names of several publishing rockstars. For a writing conference noob, it was all about networking and meeting people. So, as fun as the exhibit hall was, my fondest memories take place outside\u00a0the convention\u00a0walls.<\/p>\n

I ate meals with twitter friends (who are now OMFG BEST FRIENDS FOREVER) \"\"<\/p>\n

and wandered around the city seeing the sights while we discussed publishing trends, industry news, our querying processes and our current works in progress. We also ocassionally stuffed ourselves into a cab<\/p>\n

\"cab\"<\/a>The entire event felt like\u00a0twitter came to life Pinohico style \"group\"<\/a>and all the tweeting faces I had once seen still on my feed turned to LIFE– or as if twitter was the animated world in Enchanted and we all awoke to be REAL WRITERS. I can’t even express how attending BEA made everything in the writing that much more REAL. I mean, honestly…..look at all these amazing faces!!<\/p>\n

By the end of the weekend, I knew 100% that I had made the right decision. BEA was an amazing, stressful, eye-opening event and was probably the best weekend of my life. Without a doubt, you can count me in for next year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A year ago I was staring at twitter with ginormous envy at all the people attending BEA. Envy so large that I, as a Bostonian,\u00a0fondly named it my Green Monstah.\u00a0The Green Monstah in my belly thought it sounded like such a great experience. Meeting industry\u00a0peeps, other writers, getting books!!\u00a0And I wasn’t there. Living through the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[59,40,4,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agent","category-current-event","category-travel","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2YHlB-dT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rachelhorwitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rachelhorwitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rachelhorwitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rachelhorwitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rachelhorwitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=861"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rachelhorwitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":871,"href":"https:\/\/www.rachelhorwitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions\/871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rachelhorwitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rachelhorwitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rachelhorwitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}