Taking a short break from all the BBAW festivities today to mention an event I’m incredibly excited about: the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.!

After last year’s rainy day, I’m hoping for some decent early fall weather — because we have an all-star literary cast coming to town. With the likes of Isabel Allende, Diana Gabaldon, Julia Glass, Ken Follett, Jonathan Franzen (oh, the controversy!), Allegra Goodman, Suzanne Collins and my crush to end all crushes, Jonathan Safran Foer, it’s sure to be a fun time. (Check out the full list of featured authors for more.)

Held from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 25, rain or shine, the National Book Festival is a great way to see authors you’ve admired for years, listen to plenty of literary talk and meet other book-loving folks in the nation’s capital. The festivities are happening between 3rd and 7th Streets downtown.

I’m about 45 minutes outside the city and taking the Metro in, where I’ll spend the day dragging Spencer to a seat where I can ogle Foer and try to snap non-blurry photos while he talks about how it’s bad to eat animals. That might be awkward for me, but we’ll roll with it.

Like last year, Swapna of S. Krishna’s Books is organizing a post-event dinner for book bloggers in attendance — and I hope you can make it! Spence and I will be at Elephant & Castle, a nearby British-style pub with awesome soft pretzels, and you can get all those details here. Submit the form to Swapna by Sept. 19 so we have a way to reach one another, if desired, and hopefully grab some grub after the festival winds down.

I’ll be live tweeting from the event using the hashtag #nbf; follow me @writemeg! Twitter can be a great way to reach me on event day, too, if you’d like to track me down. Unlike the Book Blogger Convention, I haven’t yet decided what I’ll be wearing . . . that will depend on whether or not we get a nice, sunny day. Not the Power Dress, that I know, but I’ll keep you posted.

And I’ll have an epic recap. I mean, that’s what I do.