Book Signings are Awesome

Oh my goodness. It turns out book signings are even MORE awesome than I expected! You know why? Because YOU are awesome, meaning you splendiferous people who came and listened to me yammer and maybe had me sign your book and maybe are checking out my blog right this minute. Yay! If so, hello!

Hi Shannon, Ashley, Melissa, Wil, Sarah, Elena, and Syndee!

And you know who asks smart questions? Tamora Pierce fans, evidently. It made me realize how many more Tamora Pierce books I need to read…I’m on Trickster’s Choice right now. I liked the question about whether any of us work off an outline; what’s funny is that Meg Cabot just wrote a whole diary entry about this, and I have to admit I’m on her side…too much outlining, for me, just makes me bored with my book before I finish it. But I think it can be very useful with some kinds of projects, and especially once I get halfway through a story and have to figure out how I’m going to get from there to the end I want.

I also liked the question about whether we ever cast actors in our minds to play the characters we write. Of course I ended up wandering around IMDB for a while when I got home, trying to find the right actors for Avatars. Maybe Jamie Bell and Evan Rachel Wood for Gus and Venus — they’re both pretty amazing, and according to this they’re dating in real life (cute!).

JoJo could work for Venus, too, at least looks-wise — I’ve never seen her act, but I sat behind her on a plane once! Adam and I spent the whole time being like “OMG, she is totally famous! OMG, who is she? Dude, we have to figure this out! OMG, she’s painting her nails! That famous person is painting her nails! Who is she who is she?” (All right, I might be exaggerating about the “Adam and I” part of that statement. It’s possible only one of us was really interested in this enthralling three-hour conversation.) Luckily, once the plane landed she immediately got on her cell phone and managed to mention her own name a couple of times to whoever she was talking to, which is a primo marketing strategy that all celebrities should employ if possible, because now everyone on that plane can be like “hey! I was sitting near JoJo!” instead of “yeah, I think there was some kinda famous girl on my plane…”

Anyway, there’s a lot of girls who would probably work for Venus, but not so many for Kali. I couldn’t find anyone that matches the image in my head. Tigre was hard, too…maybe the closest I could find to what I’m picturing, although this might sound odd, is Ugly Betty’s younger brother Justin, played by Mark Indelicato, if you add about five or six years. Man, that kid is HILARIOUS. I loved his Halloween costume and the Gene Kelly song and dance he did in last night’s episode. He is the cutest thing ever.

Back to the signing: of course, it was incredibly thrilling to meet Laura and Tamora, both of whom were so nice and friendly and welcoming and smart.

A million thank-yous to Lee and Peter and everyone at Books of Wonder! And to Melissa for the organization and all the question-answering and the awesome green Sharpie. Thank you to Dayna for the moral support, and to Keith for spending three hours of his trip from Australia hanging around a fabulous bookstore watching me be all “la la I’m an author la la la.” And thank you thank you to everyone else for coming! Yay Liz and Calista! Yay Amanda and Andy and Kristin and Abby and Ruth! All right, I better stop that or I’ll go on for hours. But seriously, I really appreciated it. You’re all tremendously awesome.

More soon…