FictionTea

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YALC Tips & Tricks

YALC tips and tricks, and Guides to YALC are some of the best posts you can read to prepare for the UK’s biggest book festival. This is because you’re getting helpful advice from people who have experience from attending the event before. Which I have! I’ve been attending YALC since 2016 and every year has been an absolute joy.

I won’t lie guys, YALC is a lot, it’s busy, it’s exciting, it’s exhausting. But, most of all it’s ridiculously fun. I can guarantee it’ll probably be one of the best weekends of your year.

As I said before, I’ve been attending YALC since 2016, so I definitely have my fair share of experience with the event (check out my Guide to YALC here) and over the years I’ve found some tricks (or hacks, if you will) that will help you get a bit more prepared for the weekend. Some of these tips you may not have come across before and others are small, but as Tesco says, every little helps!

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What I’d Like To See At YALC 2019

YALC (Young Adult Literature Convention) is the UK’s first young adult book festival. You could say it’s the UK’s equivalent of BookCon and BookExpo which take place in a big city within the US each year. This convention started back in July 2014 with author Malorie Blackman being heavily involved in its creation. Over the years, YALC has managed to bring along best-selling authors such as Cassandra Clare, Holly Black, Maggie Stiefvater, VE Schwab, Samantha Shannon, Marcus Sedgwick, Patrick Ness and many more, making it one of the most exciting events of the year for book bloggers around the UK. I’ve been travelling down to London for YALC from Scotland every Summer since 2016, so you could say I’ve got a few years of experience attending the event.

YALC is an absolutely wonderful event and you’re always guaranteed to leave with an abundance of new books and friends. However, there are some things that I’d personally like to see in future events that I feel could definitely improve the experience for attendees, and potentially the vendors too.

We finally got the author line up for YALC 2019 this past week (it’s awesome!) so it definitely felt like the perfect time to post this! You can view the schedule here. We really appreciate all the hard work and effort people go into to make this event happen each year, I’m genuinely counting down the days till YALC 2019.

Let’s begin!

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Five Authors I’d Love To Meet

Over the past few years, I have gotten the chance to meet authors such as; Samantha Shannon, VE Schwab, Laini Taylor, Pierce Brown, Maggie Stiefvater, Holly Black, and Cassandra Clare amongst many others. I love to meet authors who’s books I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, or who’s books I’m eager to pick up in the future. However, there are some I’ve never met or, they’ve been to the UK before and I’ve not been able to attend. Usually this is because it’s a “UK tour” meaning, England tour stops only.

I made a list of top five authors (in no particular order) that I’d like to meet in the future. I hope that at least some of them come to/return to the UK at some point, because I’m positive that there are many other readers within the UK who would love to attend their events.

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Book Tag | The Greatest Showman

Hello friends,

Today, I’m bringing to you, ‘The Greatest Showman‘ book tag. I was eager to post this tag today specifically as a year ago today, this wonderful masterpiece of a movie hit the big screens. I proceeded to see it six times in the movies and fall completely in love with the soundtrack. It is officially one of my favourite movies and movie soundtracks of all time, so I could not pass up on marking the 1st anniversary of this movie with a fun book tag.

The creator of this tag is NightlyReading. But, I came across it on Victoria‘s blog a few months ago and yes, you guessed it, I have waited till now to post it, just to celebrate the movie’s 1st year in the world.

Now, without further ado, let’s jump right into this. Preferably with the soundtrack blasting in the background.

 

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YALC 2018 Review

It’s officially been one week since YALC, it’s crazy that the UK’s biggest young adult book convention has already been and gone. This time last week, I was in London with friends, filled with excitement about the event. And now, I’m already anticipating next year.

If you were following the YALC updates in the months leading up to YALC, then you know that a few things changed this year that quite a lot of attendees where unsure about. We weren’t sure if these changes would be good or bad when compared to previous years. If you read my previous post, My Guide to YALC, then you know that this was my third year attending. So, I thought I’d do a review of YALC 2018 and let you guys know what I personally thought of the changes and how I found this year compared to the previous two years that I’ve attended.

As always, please be aware that these opinions are my own and this is what I personally thought of YALC this year.

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My Guide to YALC

YALC (Young Adult Literature Convention) is the UK’s first young adult book festival. You could say it’s the UK’s equivalent of BookCon and BookExpo which take place in a big city within the US each year. This convention started back in July 2014 with author Malorie Blackman being heavily involved in it’s creation. Over the years, YALC has managed to bring along best-selling authors such as Cassandra Clare, Holly Black, Maggie Stiefvater, VE Schwab, Samantha Shannon, Marcus Sedgwick, Patrick Ness and many more, making it one of the most exciting events for book bloggers around the UK. I’ve been travelling down to London for YALC from Scotland every Summer since 2016, this will be my third year attending and so I thought I’d share some tips and tricks for you guys to help make your YALC experience more enjoyable.

When I went to YALC the first time, I had no idea what was going on. You’d look one way and people would be running towards a booth. You’d look the other way and people would be searching the hall for a hidden object. The first time was absolute madness for me, but I managed to make some new friends as well as hang out with friends I’d met through the book community too. I hope these tips and tricks will be useful for you, I have learned these from experience, but also remember that everyone handles events like this differently, so make sure you know what you want out of this experience, whether it’s to meet your favourite authors, get your books signed, make new friends, talk to publishers, take part in the workshops, etc. Know what you want out of this experience, then plan and organise around it.

(I may use photos that are not mine for this post to give you guys a feel of YALC, I don’t really have many photos inside of YALC, unfortunately! I will credit and link the owner below each photo, unless it really is mine.)

Anyway, let’s get to these tips…

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My Top Ten Books of 2016

In 2016, I was a very busy bee. I did the second half of my final design project for University (which is the equivalent to a dissertation), I travelled a lot and I returned to College to pursue Graphic Design. Being this busy hasn’t allowed me to read as much as I wanted to. I actually lost count of the books I read, but I’m pretty sure its somewhere in the low 40’s. Two years ago, I managed to read almost 100 books, so I would love to try reach that amount again in the future. I’m not usually one to set Goodreads Goals, because I feel like that’s too much pressure. As in, everyone can see if you’ve failed your goal. Which tends to happen to me…a lot.

Despite all that, I had a really good reading year, I loved most of the books I read. I don’t think I rated anything below 3 stars! Which, in my opinion, is pretty damn awesome. I only really had one reading slump back in May, and I managed to branch into a few New Adult books, which I ended up absolutely loving.

So, without further ado, here is my top 10 books (in no particular order) from 2016!

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A New Year, A New Blog

Well, I have finally done it. I have finally launched my own blog!

I have quite literally been working on this since May 2016, but due to other arrangements, class assignments and life in general getting in the way, a lot of breaks were taken in the construction of this website. I had originally planned to launch the blog back on September 19th, which happened to be my bookstagram account’s second birthday, but clearly that did not happen.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Lauren and I’m known as FictionTea in the online book community, specifically on Instagram and Twitter. Being able to talk to fellow readers about books has been an absolute dream and for the past year I have wanted to expand FictionTea into an official book blog where I can hopefully reach and interact more with other bookworms. Over on my Instagram I do book reviews, bookish product reviews, book hauls, bookish DIYS, book discussions, etc and I’m hoping to bring that all here as well as continuing to post on my Instagram.

I’m incredibly excited to finally start posting content on here for you guys, I have so many things planned including: Bookmark and other bookish DIYs, reading snack recipes, book reviews, read-a-longs…Basically, a lot of stuff. I hope you all enjoy my posts, I’m going to aim to post 2 – 3 times a week depending on my College work when I start back.

I also want to wish you all a Happy New Year! And, an absolutely wonderful 2017. I hope it brings you all nothing but happiness and good times.

 

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