It’s been exactly one month since #AprilFeelsDay2017 happened, and how do we recap the feels? Oh, I don’t know. I am pretty coherent now after all the flood of feelings that didn’t end on April 30, so let’s try.
I did a bit more work behind the scenes in this one, since Mina was on a trip early April. I ended up doing logistics for the event again, which was kind of funny. I always said I wasn’t a logistics person when it comes to events because how to deal with ingress and egress and all the equipment and layout and stuff? But to be honest, it was fun, and Filipino ReaderCon 2015 prepared me for this. The one for #AprilFeelsDay2017 was pretty easy. 😉
Let me bombard you with photos from the event at this point, because I think the entire morning of April 30 kind of left me in a daze from all the preps. (More when you go through the #AprilFeelsDay2017 Instagram tag!)
So it’s been a week and a day since #FeelsFest happened, and I think I’m coherent enough to do a recap.
Soon after we finished our super exhausting and successful time at the Manila International Book Fair, it was time to get started preparing for #FeelsFest. No rest for the feelings, as we said. We’ve known about #FeelsFest even before #FeelsRushIn happened, and we figured we can make this bigger, so it was bigger. Unfortunately, work came rushing in as well in the weeks leading to this (busy with a side of crazy, involving a multi-country project launch, haha), but because all things in #romanceclass are pretty much made with (so much) love, more volunteers stepped in to make the event a success.
1. Make sure you attend the event with a full stomach.
Eat, have a snack, or all things. During #AprilFeelsDay, #FeelsRushIn, and #AllTheFeels, I remember having a meal right before the event started. A good, full meal, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat until it ends. This time, though, I had to do some family things before I could go to the venue, so when I arrived at Glorietta, I was starving. You know the kind of hunger that you just know you need to eat something, anything, and you went to the wrong direction of the mall and all you saw was an ice cream shop (when there’s actually a Starbucks and Family Mart on the other side of the mall) so you just decided to get a cone? Yes, that. I ended up running entirely on sugar the rest of the afternoon, which wasn’t really bad, except I felt like I was partly incoherent. Haha.
(Or you know, it could be just the feelings that happened right after.)
Who would have thought that it would become this three years ago?
When Ron asked that question sometime in the middle of that hot Sunday afternoon while we were in Pegi Waffles, I smiled. I’ve asked the same thing about other things several times (like Filipino ReaderCon, or the book club), but hearing it again for another thing just never gets old. It’s amazing what people with like-minded interests can do.
Especially like-minded romance writers and readers with lots of feelings.
So, last Sunday, April 17, was the first ever #AprilFEELSday! It’s a celebration of romance books and authors and readers, with various activities like book selling, tarot card reading, writing and publishing Q&A, poetry reading, and the much-awaited live reading sessions from the next seasons of the #romanceclass podcast.
It was a hot, hot day made even hotter by the number of people that sat inside Pegi Waffles. I just realized that I hardly sat down that day – save for the time that I ate lunch, and then when all was over and we were all hanging out and waiting for everyone to leave and settle the payment. But it was fine, because the place was so packed that I didn’t have any place to sit, anyway.
