Thought I'd recap my visit to Chicago's Printer's Row Lit Fest on Sunday past.

I'm a genre fiction guy; the literary fiction is fine but I lean toward mysteries and SF and horror and fantasy. If it tells a good story, I'm there, be it literary or genre or even non-fiction.

So that's where I was on Sunday.

First I visited the Mystery Writers of America tent. Met Julie Hyzy, a really nice lady who lives not too far from me. I downloaded a Kindle book by her called DEADLY BLESSINGS; it was free yesterday and might still be free today (if you're interested). Just because she was so nice, I'll be giving her a try when I next visit the B&N by me.

Somehow it came up that I was a dentist (in the course of discussing fellow mystery writer Denise Swanson) and she pointed out a man doing a reading in the tent, named J. Michael Major. It so happens that he was a dentist who had just published his first novel. One year behind me in school, graduated from Northwestern University College of Dentistry. The book is called ONE MAN'S CASTLE, and I'm reading it currently.

I stopped at the Echelon/Quake Press booth, where I met authors like Mark Vun Kannon, Sean Hayden, Jen Wylie, and Gale Borger. I had met Mark about three years ago and had met Sean two years ago. Seems Sean met Jen Wylie at that Printer's Row Fest a couple years ago, and sparks flew, and, well...they've done gotten engaged at THIS year's Printer's Row. Ms. Wylie is a very talented writer and she and Sean are running Untold Press, which is doing well publishing their works and the works of other authors as well.

I then meandered over to Post-Mortem Press, which publishes "Dark Fiction". Met a couple of authors, including Christian Larsen, whose book I bought. Last year their covers left something to be desired, but this year all of the covers looked great! Larsen's book looks interesting.

There were a lot of booksellers present, and a lot of other presses/publishers putting out political and non-fiction works. I didn't spend too much time at any of them, though I did scan the titles of most of the sellers to see if anything jumped out at me.

Were I to give them advice, I would tell them to invite more small presses and small publishers. I would tell them to try to encourage the participation of even more local authors. I realize that they had a lot of authors there, especially Chicago area writers, but I'd like to see them more centralized. I loved the way Echelon did their booth, with the authors spread around the booth and VERY accessible.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable festival!

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