Pamela Coughlan, Conference Organizer

In KidLitCon 09 Part One, I featured some of the brilliant and amazing authors and book reviewers I met, because they were really my primary reason for going. It’s always fun (and sometimes surprising) to finally see the people behind the blogs.

Maureen Kearney blogs at Confessions of a Bibliovore. What secret is Cornelius sharing?

Speaking of brilliant and amazing, a big thank you to Pam Coughlan (MotherReader) for making the conference possible through all her hard work, perseverance, good humor, patience, and ingeniousness. In addition to setting up all the inspiring and informative panel discussions, she pulled off the coup of all coups by inviting a representative from the FTC to address our widespread panic concerns about how their new Endorsement Guidelines will affect book bloggers. Suffice to say, a collective sigh of relief has now blanketed the kidlitosphere because of Mary Engle’s reassuring words.

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So, Cornelius and I spent Saturday hobnobbing at the Kidlit Conference in Arlington, Virginia. Here he is greeting the one and only Ellsworth of Ellsworth’s Journal. This was a rare pleasure, because we’ve been fans of Ellsworth, her co-blogger, Winchester the Cat, and The Writer (Candice Ransom) for quite some time.

Candice (prolific author of more than 100 books!) and I had met before, but hadn’t seen each other for many years. What fun it was to compare notes about the many ups and downs of blogging and trying to keep abreast of the whole social networking thing. And, there are some uncanny similaries between us: we’re about the same age (28) ☺, bear collectors/antique lovers, long-time residents of Virginia, we both had gotten up at 4 a.m. that morning, ate the very same thing for lunch, and left the conference at the same time. Oh, and, you know the woods around our house I always talk about? They just happen to be the very same ones Candice grew up in, where she collected chestnut acorns, sat on big logs and made up her first stories! How cool is that?

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