Spent last weekend at Y’ALLFest in Charleston. Great fun was had by all… and oh, the pie. THE PIE. But more on that later.
The bad news is I was kind of crap at taking pictures this YA’LLFest, so there are actually no pictures of me with the people I ended up spending the most time with: Carrie Ryan, Michelle Hodkin, Cinda Williams Chima, and Simone Elkeles. Criminal neglect of my camera phone, y’all.
In the morning, Cinda Williams Chima and David MacGinnis Gill were nice enough to invite me with them to an awesome little local coffee shop called Kudu, despite my obvious lack of three names (Maybe I could be an honorary Diana Peter Freund for the occasion?). David even took a picture of the leaf they made in my chai tea (because I do not drink coffee). Did *I* get a picture of that. No, of course not. But I did find this one that Cinda took of David and me. You can tell it’s Cinda taking the picture because it’s obviously tilted up.
Cinda: gorgeous writer, very petite.
As you can see from the pic, I was set for the festival in a post-apocalyptic sweater and my unicorn necklace. Or “piece” as Simone Elkeles called it, right before she started plotting to steal it right off my neck.
She was not successful. The first event of the morning was the keynote speech by Holly Black and Cassandra Clare about literary friendships. The rest of the YALLFest participants were all up in the balcony nodding and, if you are Carrie and me, high fiving each other for putting zombie/unicorn shout-outs in each of our second YA novels. Because, apparently, according to Cassie and Holly’s exhaustive research, this is what literary friends do, when they are not, like Dickens, offering to finish Wilkie Collins’s new novel due to pneumonia or something.
This was to be the last time I saw Carrie all day long, because man, we were some busy little writers. Last year, YA’LLFest was very chill, and we kind of hung out and ate pie and chatted. This year, there were THREE stages, and when you weren’t on one of those stages, you were signing, and there were double the authors and it was all sponsored by like, Amazon and Tumblr and CreateSpace — anyway. We hit the big time, I guess.
Here’s my first panel, “Histories and Mysteries”:
That John Corey Whaley giving the thumbs up, then the one with the gorgeous hair is Robin Wasserman, then Sarah Rees Brennan, then I’m giving the goofy smile way at the end. I think this pic was taken by Andrea Cremer, our moderator, who has a secret life as a History Professor. The person sitting behind Sarah Rees Brennan there is Deb Harkness, ALSO a bestselling writer and history professor. Yeah, we’re all classy up in this festival.
So I got to talk about all the cool history that informed the killer unicorniverse, which, let me tell you, I could do all day, even intimidated as I was to be sitting next to serious “16th century history of medicine” PhDs like Deb.
Here’s my second panel, which was about science fiction:
I think this may be the first official instagram on this blog. Ever. Anyway, back row is Beth Revis, Kim Derting, and Kathy “Bones” Reichs. Front row is David MacGinnis Gill, Jennifer Lyn Barnes, and me and my post-apocalyptic sweater.
Awesome panel. Jen and Kathy bonded over living on islands filled with monkeys, David told us about how he actually made himself a globe map of Mars, and we all got to geek out about Star Wars.
I also did a signing.
Here I am with a reader named Alli. This picture has been shamelessly stolen from Alli’s blog. Here, I will make it up to you. In my story, “Foretold” — the name of the narrator, who is never actually named in the story because the whole point of the story is that she has always defined herself in relation to her sister, Emily? Guess what her name is!
Anyway.
Another attendee had painted each of her nails to symbolize one of the author’s books. Or, um, I guess for only ten of the authors. But one of the books she picked was For Darkness Shows the Stars. And here we are, showing off our nails:
I *always* have FDSTS nails, so…
After that I went to the movie panel, where I got to see special exclusive content for the Beautiful Creatures movie and you didn’t, ha ha. Oh wow, is this going to be one gorgeous film. Then there were all these great questions to Kami and Margie and Cassie about the films and being on set and the cast and it was so exciting. Also, how great is the casting of Simon? It’s going to be bril.
Then was the Smackdown. Oh, the Smackdown! For those who don’t know (because I skipped it last year, seeing as I was missing Q too much to stay in South Carolina), the YA Smackdown is a big skit gameshow thing all the authors perform in at the end of YALLFest. This year I was on “Team Dystopian” — which was ROBBED, ROBBED I tell you, do to one little accidental F-bomb drop. (In SPANISH, no less.) And, to add insult to injury, this happened:
That is a pie. In my face. Thrown by Pseudonymous Bosch in a fit of pique after he, too, lost.And I was not the only victim:
The horror! The indignity!
The AWESOMENESS. Perhaps you can’t understand, but to a young girl from Florida who dreamed of one day growing up and going on Double Dare, having a pie thrown in your face on stage was… well, kind of a dream come true. A sticky, smelly, sweater-ruining dream come true.
Just kidding. My post-apocalyptic sweater is totally fine.
I hope.
