On ALA

So I survived ALA, thanks to the support of my editor and author friends.Friday afternoon, Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl took pity on me and called up, inviting me to come hang with them on the floor. We did. We snagged some swag. I also met their lovely editor Julie, and I may have accidentally sold her a book for $0.35 worth of parking meter change.

Oops. My agent’s totally going to kill me.

The next day, I left the house at 6:30 AM to make my early, early early morning breakfast with Harper Collins, where I met some other authors and a bunch of lovely librarians. Man, I love librarians. So knowledgeable! So passionate! So stylish!

Then, I headed back to the exhibit hall, where I ran into heaps of authors, attended a few signings, picked up even more swag — swag! Swag! How do I love thee? A few of the authors I hung out with: Malinda Lo, author of Ash; Danielle Joseph, author of Shrinking Violet; John Green, author of Looking for Alaska and PaperTowns and Will Grayson, Will Grayson.

Here I am with the beautiful Malinda Lo, whose moody, evocative debut ASH I read last year by firelight during a blackout. It’s also a great book to read over your air-conditioning vent this summer, though. Malinda’s next book is called Huntress. As you can imagine, I’m all over that. We had lunch and talked about researching hunting. She lives in Northern California, which is great for that.

I ran into Alaya Dawn Johnson ever so breifly — just long enough to tell her how much I love her story in Zombies vs. Unicorns (it’s awesome, ya’ll, even if it is about zombies). Speaking of zombies, check out this travesty:

She was so SMUG about it, too! To my face, y’all. To my face. Do you think Astrid would put up with that?

Actually, Astrid is afraid of zombies, too. She has no special powers to deal with those.

And, since I know y’all are wondering about the ice cream, I am so happy to report that at ALA, ice cream is free! Yeah, they were just handing it out on the street corner. Here’s Malinda, me, and Danielle Jospeh eating our free ice cream, in a picture taken by John Green. (You’d think someone who spends so much time filming could have snapped a pic where we were all looking at the camera, but whatever):

This was taken on our way to lunch with Pam Bachorz, author of Candor, Jon Skovron, author of Struts & Frets, Holly Cupala, author of Tell Me a Secret, and L.K. Madigan, award-winning author of Flash Burnout. Yeah, it was kinda a debs party I crashed. They’re very nice.

And yes, that means we had ice cream on the WAY to lunch.

After lunch, I rushed back to the exhibit hall for my signing. Yay, signing!

It went great — we gave away ALL my copies of Ascendant ARCs, and the unicorn horn lollipops were a hit. Killer unicorns FTW!

No matter what John Green says. (Also, I totally did the filming of the part where John steals the book.)