BEA

I forgot to blog about the BookExpo America. It's a trade show for the publishing industry. It goes from city-to-city. It's only in LA every few years. The first/last time I attended, I was still relatively new to Hollywood. I walked around and picked up a bunch of free books and left. I read a couple of the books and gave the rest to my parents.

This time around, I rolled in like a pimp hustler looking to get some bidness done.

Last Wednesday, I sat in on a book-to-film panel. I answered some questions and that was that. Then I spent a couple of hours taking pitches. I used to do the pitch fest thing all the time. These days it's pretty rare. I almost never find anything. I spent most of the pitch fest talking to the agents around me. I met some cool people and split.

I went back to the BEA a couple of days later, and spent all day Saturday there. By "all day," I mean crack of dawn until the place closed. I burned some serious shoe leather, man. I collected a stack of business cards the size of a grapefruit and lugged about fifty pounds of books outta there. Some of them I got just to get, but a lot I picked up for the film potential. I took a bunch of meetings that were great.

And I spent a lotta time pimping the forthcoming UN-DEAD novel. It's funny... there's this stereotype that no one in Hollywood reads. That's untrue -- I work in Hollywood, and I read like a motherfucker. And I know a lotta other people who are very well-read, especially the smarter writers and directors. And agents, especially.

But... when I bandy around the fact that THE UN-DEAD is the official sequel to Bram Stoker's DRACULA, the movie-types tend to respond like it's little more than a fun fact. "Oh, really? That's pretty cool."

Then I throw the same thing out at the BEA -- a giant convention center full of thousands of people who love books and work in books and know about books -- and there's genuine excitement. Suddenly, I'm talking about something of real interest.

Fun stuff. And lemme tell ya -- this job beats the shit out of delivering auto parts.