So last night I arrived at a packed bar in Shoreditch Highstreet with Matt feeling kind of nervous. He’d received an invite to a writers and bloggers shindig organised by Quercus Books and I, who have actually done a placement with them before, was coming along as his +1.
You can imagine what was going through my mind. I won’t bore you with the details, but it was along the lines of: “Oh fuck nobody will remember me and we’ll be trying to sneak out unnoticed within 10 minutes of arriving”. Well, I needn’t have worried! As soon as we walked in we were greeted by the lovely Kathryn from the rights department (who actually had me packing books up on my first day) and was soon joined by the equally lovely Nicolla, assistant editor for Jo Fletcher. It turns out that they certainly hadn’t forgotten me and, amazingly, they’d known Matt and I were a couple and were counting on us coming together.
How lovely is that? All my fears were just blown away. I realised I was in for a lovely evening of chit-chat with some really lovely people – nothing more sinister than that. When Kathryn said she’d been reading our blogs, though, my heart did do a little leap. You see, this was a party for bloggers, right? Well Matt’s blog actually has a vague point to it, where as mine is full of rambling rubbish like this. Well, thank God i’d earned my place by being one of their work experience peeps!
We spent the evening chatting to Tom Fletcher, Mark from My Favourite Books, and of course the Quercus team. There was a free bar, nibbles and even a big goody-bag of books for Matt to take away. Given that Nicola had given me lots of freebies on my placement I had no right to be jealous of that, but, damnit…I kinda was. There were some awesome looking books in that bag!
As usual Quercus were so generous that every little detail made it a really delightful evening. Oh, and I may have dropped a few massive hints that I’d love to be put forward for their internship scheme whenever they think about launching it. You can bet I’ll definitely be in touch about that!
