I know I already complained about this once on the blog, but I am DONE with the snow. It’s not just the fact that it’s snowed more where we live than it did the previous five years. Or the fact that it’s snowing again. No, it’s the fact that these snow storms are also managing to coincide with my travel. Because, you know, hanging out in the airport and figuring out how to get to/from conferences via plane, train and automobile is JUST how I want to spend my time. You?

So yep, as I type this, I’ve made it from NYC to Philly and I’m in the Philly airport. Right now my flight home is just delayed, not canceled yet. Yet. I’ve been here for an hour and it was so tempting to just assume the flight would be canceled and to go ahead and rent a car. I could be home in just a few hours. But I’m waiting and we’re under a 45 minute delay right now. I expect more to come. Whee!

On the other hand, I did have a fantastic trip to NYC where I was attending and presenting at the Tools of Change conference. I gave two presentations at the conference, and also got a chance to go to the Harlequin NY offices and meet with some of the editorial staff there, and talk about Carina. My favorite thing! Tools of Change is a conference that I love, because I get to meet up with and talk to people from all areas of publishing. Three days of talking about publishing and listening to how others are innovating? Fascinating and energizing.

I’m hoping to share a bit more about what I did there (including more about my presentations) when I’m more fully rested and not stuck in an airport wondering if I’ll ever get home!

Look what I found last night that’s now available online! It’s the video of my presentation with Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Malle Vallik of Harlequin and Kassia Krozser of Booksquare, Smart Bitches Women Read Ebooks. I’ve only watched the first few minutes, but I do plan on watching it again, to agonize over what I wish I’d said differently, how I looked and how awesomely smart and savvy my panel-mates sound. I was so impressed with how polished they sounded!

You can watch it here if the embedded video below doesn’t work. Oh, and I love how the video is frozen with me in the midst of drinking from the bottle. Lovely.

ETA: After setting up this post last night, I ended up watching the entire 45 minute video because it was like hearing the conversation for the first time, and it was quite interesting. We’re smart women! I think the presentation goes much like a blog post on the topic might, very conversational, with some disagreement, but lots of information. Not too boring at all

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TOC Beat?

Kat Meyer produced this mock magazine cover about the Tools of Change conference. I’m particularly tickled to be shown there along with Sarah of the Smart Bitches and Kassia of Booksquare. It made me laugh. Good show, Kat!

TOC Beat

The confession today is that I’m so sick, being upright is a struggle. I flew home yesterday (3 flights total and 12 hours of travel time/layovers) with winds gusting to 50 mph and a raging case of the flu. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. Yeah.

I’ve never been so happy to be home, where I could huddle in bed and have my husband coddle me. And I was even happier (to be home safely) when I woke up this morning and heard about the plane that crashed here on the East Coast, with no survivors. So I’m trying hard not to whine too much about how nauseous I am or what a miserable travel experience I had.

Anyway, rather than the rather massive page of links I normally give you, I’m going to link you to some things from the conference I attended this week, the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York City. Really, it was a fabulous conference and it for exceeded my expectations. I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did, but I attribute that to my inner geek, which silently squeed in joy at every keynote and panel I attended. But mostly I attribute it to the amazing people I got to meet and chat with, none of whom got that glazed-eye look when I talked about things like DRM, social media, target audience, eink devices or other things regarding digital publishing. If anything, they were even more passionate about it than me!

Tools of Change conference notes from Mark Coker

The Tools of Change twitter feed and a raw dump of the feed from Andrew Savakis

The best of TOC is available as a free book here

See my interpretive dance

A post with some thoughts on my (our) panel along with a link to a video interview with SB Sarah.

Kassia gave a small preview of what we’d be chatting about in the panel.

SarahW has a post on what she got out of the panel.

Links to some of the incredible people I met at Tools of Change:

Ron Hogan of Beatrice.com

Richard Nash of Soft Skull

Kirk Biglione–awesome husband to Kassia Kroszer of Booksquare, who is equally as awesome. Individually, they’re slightly frightening but together they’re awe-inspiring and intimidating as hell.

Colleen Lindsey, who I met at the Monday night TweetUp and swore I’d met before. Very, very funny and bright lady.

Of course there were many others, but since this short post has now taken me all day to write thanks to the stupid flu, perhaps I should post it before the day is over?

And on a related side note, the #1 thing I learned from the TOC conference? I want to be smart like that. Oh my god those people are bright, amazing and talented. I wonder if God could suddenly endow me thusly?

But seriously, if you have any interest in techno-geekery and digital content, TOC is a conference you should think about for 2010. It rocked!

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I don’t have the energy to do my Day 3 update. I’m not even sure I even remember what happened yesterday (okay really I do, but dang I’m tired). I am just completely wiped from an endless whirl of panels, keynotes and lunch/dinners with so many fascinating people. I even just turned down a tempting offer for more fun convo and drinks. But really, I just need to collapse into my bed with Chuck now (don’t worry honey, I mean Chuck on my Zen player.

I’m having breakfast with Kassia Kroszer in the morning and then will be winging my way home so I’ll be sure to fill in the details later in the week. I do want to try to do at least one round-up post of my thoughts on the Tools of Change conference, but in brief: I loved every minute of it.

Since I spent the majority of the day with Sarah of SmartBitches, you can see some of our day’s experiences at her blog, complete with video of me doing an interpretive dance of a new reader (utter fail) we saw demo’d.

Yesterday I traveled to NYC. It wasn’t the best day of traveling I’ve ever had. Because I live in a small town, I had to hop three flights to get to NYC. I don’t normally mind flying, so this wasn’t a big deal to me.

But the first flight was really turbulent, horribly, horribly hot (I stripped down to my tank top, thank goodness I always travel in layers) and came complete with screaming toddler directly behind me. Really, I didn’t blame him. Thankfully, it was a short hop so the misery was over quickly.

The second flight was fine and I had a two hour layover in Norfolk,Virginia, where I had to switch airlines and so, leave security, go to another concourse and re-enter security. Bleh. The flight was overbooked but since I had Mamma Mia tickets, I couldn’t give up my seat. I was pleased because it was a plane with one row of single seats on one side (double on the other) and I was in a single so I had a window and an aisle seat all in one. But then…we waited. And waited. For over an hour we sat on the tarmac waiting for the okay from air traffic control to take off. Too much traffic over JFK so they wouldn’t release us. Bleh. I started to worry about making the show.

We finally did land at JFK around 5pm and since the show was at 7pm, I figured I was good. Until I discovered that I had made it but my bag hadn’t. Ugh. Even better, I had packed my coat in my suitcase since I had no need of it while traveling (it was gorgeous everywhere I went). So without luggage or coat, I hopped a cab to Times Square and my hotel. And discovered I dislike both the NY cab experience and NY traffic.

I did make it to my hotel by just after 6, got checked in (by that time I was convinced the next thing to go wrong would be a lost hotel reservation),threw my stuff in my room and booked it to the theater. Slightly chilly but not too bad. I made it with 20 minutes to spare!

Mamma Mia was fabulous, amazing, awesome, energetic, ginormously fun and all other good adjectives you can think of. I loved every minute. I grinned the whole time. I saw the movie a few weeks ago, and liked it, but it doesn’t capture the magic, depth or sheer talent of the stage show. Did I mention I loved it?

For the first act, I was sitting at the back of the orchestra seats, with half a row to myself (a pole separated me from the other half). I was totally fine with this. The seats were great and I had little problem seeing, though I am kind of short (don’t tell my husband I admitted to that). When I came back from intermission, my row was full! I guess some other people didn’t like their seats so they moved because, as they said “when we looked over, all we saw was one little girl sitting all by herself”. That would be me. They were very nice, but the lady used her seat and then half of mine for her arm space. But after some rearranging, we got things squared away and I also ended up with, don’t laugh, a booster cushion. Which was good since I was in a different seat with a taller man in front of me.

People are always curious to know why I’m somewhere by myself. I’m so used to going to things solo, it never occurs to me that it’s not the norm, but I guess most people do go to shows with friends. So the lady asked me why, I said I was traveling for work. From their the conversation went on to that I’m in publishing, we publish romance, and yes there is a lot of demand for “that sort of book”. I always love to watch people’s faces as they process “romance”. Yes, romance for women. Books about love. Yes, lots of people buy it. Yes, I do like it. Yes, that’s what Harlequin publishes (or Mills and Boon if you’re having this conversation in Australia/New Zealand or other parts of Europe).

The second act was as fabulous as the first and the lady next to me and I immediately jumped up to dance at the end. Not too many others were standing and dancing, but we didn’t care. Then in the second encore song, some random guy in the front stood,then a lady and just like that, the whole audience was standing and dancing (how they resisted the first song, I don’t know). What a fun way to end the show, with three encore songs (Mamma Mia, Dancing Queen and Waterloo for those wondering), bright colors and high energy. I left the theater totally energized and upbeat. Just what I needed after my day of traveling.

I wandered Times Square for awhile, the energy of it is just a lot of fun at night (haven’t been during the day yet). At one point, I happened by the backstage door where the cast of In the Heights was coming out to sign autographs and people were screaming. Made me wish I had time to see it (but I don’t).

So while I didn’t love the cab or the NY traffic experience, the show, the downtown area of Times Square, the energy and even the kind of jaded, slightly unfriendly and sometimes rude people have all been a really unique experience. Especially when you add in Batman. Did I forget to mention he was in the middle of the street last night? Yeah.

Welcome to NYC. Where, apparently, anything goes.