Fun at Pride 2018

I had a great time at Pride this year! We got really lucky with the weather – Saturday was warm and sunny, but not quite as hot as some years. On Sunday there were brief, hard showers round the metro Twin Cities area (including up by my house) but only 4 drops of rain at Pride itself. It wasn’t so windy we had to anchor down the swag and books, or as dusty as last year. Wonderful days. And I got to finally meet author Jaye McKenna face to face after years of online friendship, as well as reconnect with Posy Roberts and Rory Ni Coileain.

We met some great people, and talked books, writing, genre issues, publishing… dogs, recipes… 🙂 We met some aspiring writers, and others with a completed book they want to publish. We met readers who knew half the books in the genre, and others who had not found books with happy endings for gay couples. There is still clearly a dearth of LGBTQ fiction in paper in brick and mortar bookstores. We were selling ours close to author cost, so hopefully we sent people off happy with their purchases.

We were located between a booth with some lovely dresses, another with fun fairy wings and knit hats (I seriously want the rainbow Tardis hat), and across from the corsets, wolverine gauntlets, and shiny underwear booth. Everyone’s enthusiasm was contagious (and wow, some of those folk have so much energy. None of us are really sales folk.) We saw lots of wonderful pets out with their humans celebrating, including a kitten and a rabbit and many cute dogs wearing their human’s colors with Pride. A good time was had by all.

BTW, I had a teacher/librarian asking if I knew any children’s picture books with LGBTQ content and adult characters of color (parents, teachers) in them. If anyone knows of something, (or is maybe writing a child’s book with gay POC parents, or a trans kid and POC teacher…) let me know. There are still some gaps in the books we can find. I applaud this gentleman’s search to give his young students images of their real lives.

Now I have 4 days to get ready for flying off to EuroPrideCon. I’ll see how many clothes I can fit into the weight allowance once the books are packed 🙂 If you’ll be there, I look forward to seeing you.