Coming Soon to a Bookstore Near You!
Hello lovely readers!
What is coming soon to a bookstore near you, you ask?
Well, first of all, Spirit Animals Book Five: Against the Tide — in just three more weeks!
Eeee, I’m so excited for you all to read it!
And what else?
Possibly ME! I’m going to be talking about books in places other than Boston! Very soon! Like, October and November! (Which is suddenly crazy-soon, I can’t even handle it, because it means abandoning my little bears for a week and O THE GUILT, it’s terrible terrible.)
But on the plus side, hopefully I’ll get to meet lots of you and answer all your dragon-y questions! Yay! And since book 6 is ALL DONE, I figure I can even read a sneak peek of it to whoever shows up at these events. Right? Ooooo? Now you really have to come! 🙂
So I’m going to add an Events page to my website and try to update that whenever more details come in, but I wanted to give you lots of notice for three events that are definite right now:
Thursday, October 2: I’ll be doing a panel at Williams College with 3 other alumni authors of young adult fiction: Kristin Cashore (author of Graceling, Fire, and Bitterblue), Dayna Lorentz (author of the No Safety in Numbers trilogy and the Dogs of the Drowned City trilogy), and Caragh O’Brien (author of the Birthmarked trilogy and Vault of Dreamers). 8pm, Goodrich Hall, Williams College, Williamstown, MA.
This one is aimed more at college students/older readers and we’ll be talking about writing in general, I suspect, rather than our specific books — this is not the event to come to for a sneak peek at book 6! But I am super-super-excited about it because two of these three authors are literally two of my best friends in the world (I know, I got very lucky having amazing friends who are also amazing authors!), and although I haven’t met Caragh yet, she also seems extremely awesome (and I just finished Birthmarked and LOVED IT).
So this feels less like an event (i.e. stressful) and more like a JOYFUL GATHERING of favorite people to talk about books books books YAY!
And in tandem with that, the four of us will be doing a bookstore reading/visit/event the next day, 4pm on Friday, October 3 at Northshire Books in Manchester, VT. This one will involve reading and chatting and questions and I would LOVE to see you there! Please come!
Then there will be more exciting things in, hopefully, Denver! and Salt Lake City!, but the next definite one I can put here is that I’ll be at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee, on Sunday, October 12 (and maybe on the 11th, but definitely the 12th). So cool! I’ve never been to Nashville! And check out who else will be there — Katherine Applegate (swoon, I adore her books!), Jasper Fforde, Varian Johnson, and Betsy Bird, who writes a wonderful blog I love and has now written a WONDERFUL BOOK:
which I have only read part of so far, but I instantly knew I needed to own it — it is so so marvelous. If you’re at all curious about the behind-the-scenes secrets of children’s book publishing, this is the book to get. 🙂 (And they have a lovely blog including several stories that didn’t make it in, too!)
So I hope any of you near Nashville will come join us! It sounds like an awesome festival. I’ll post more specific info once I know any of it! But hopefully I’ll be talking about dragons and spirit animals and things, and it should be thrilling thrilling thrilling. 🙂
Oh, and speaking of Spirit Animals! I can also be found somewhere else right now, in the virtual sense, which is to say, on the Spirit Animals forums! I’ve posted a hello message there and I’ll be back there soon to answer some of the awesome questions that have been raised by the commenters. I’m completely in love with everyone over there — all the responses to my first message have been so funny and sweet and wonderful! I feel the same way about the people who post on my Facebook page — I wish I had time to answer everyone, but I do read everything and I love all the messages there, too! You guys are awesome.
OK, I should really go to bed, but I will be back soon with more details about my October/November travels! I can’t believe the summer just disappeared on me. I did write one entire book in that time (Menagerie 3: Krakens and Lies! coming in March 2015! Hooray!), which was sort of exhausting and mind-blowing (thank goodness for Kari, is all I can say), but I hope you all like it. And then I tried to spend every other minute with my little bears, so that’s why I haven’t been here lately.
But hopefully I’ll make up for it by being out and about and doing lots of stuff this fall! And maybe I’ll see you then . . . fingers crossed!
Good luck with back to school, everyone! And wish me luck leaving my little one at preschool! I’m such a pile of sniffles about it, oh my goodness.
Quote of the Day:
“Did I ever tell you . . . I was taken out to luncheon and offered, with great ceremony, the opportunity to be an editor in the adult department? . . . I almost pushed the luncheon table into the lap of the pompous gentleman opposite me and then explained kindly that publishing children’s books was what I did, that I couldn’t possibly be interested in books for dead dull finished adults, and thank you very much but I had to get back to my desk to publish some more good books for bad children.” — Ursula Nordstrom (editor of Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein, and Margaret Wise Brown, among others)