Birth-month Celebration: Caribbean Festival and Jane Austen Book Fair

At the beginning of this month, I posted my plans to celebrate my birth-month. I’ve done two of the things on my list so far, one good, one bad.

Greeter at the door

The first was the Caribbean Festival in Bladensburg, MD. It’s not so much that this event was bad, it was just too small. I’d walked through all the venders in five minutes. There were bands performing, which made it a little better. I think the biggest problem with the event was me. I’d had a particularly rough day and just couldn’t change the direction of my emotions to enjoy the event. I did, however, bought a pina colada snow cone (it’s been years since I had one of those), so the event wasn’t a total loss.

Used book sale

This past weekend, I attended a book fair hosted Jane Austen Society of North America’s Metropolitan DC chapter. The event was great. The event featured six different authors who’ve written Jane Austen themed books. The authors included: Sandy Lerner (writing as Ava Farmer), Janet Mullany, Catherine Reef, Lori Smith (I already had a book by her), Margaret C. Sullivan, Diana Peterfreund, and Amy Corwin. Each author read a passage (or two) from their books and there was a short Q&A session at the end. The event also included a book signing, a used book table and refreshments. We were even greeted by a woman dressed in period clothing. Very cool.

Author chats and book signings

I really enjoyed myself.  It was nice to pick up some more Austen-themed books for my collection, but it was also nice to talk to the authors. Janet Mullany, Diana Peterfrund and Lori Smith had some very encouraging words for me as a writer, something I sorely needed. I learned that all of Jane Austen’s novels were self-published except Pride and Prejudice. I didn’t know that.

This was a great event for my birth-month celebration. I will certainly be hoping there will be another one of these next year. Nothing better than a perpetual birth-month celebration.