Meeting Maggie Stiefvater, Carrie Ryan, and Jackson Pearce

I was playing around on twitter a few weeks ago, and stumbled across a tweet that Maggie Stiefvater was coming to New Orleans. I was thrilled - I haven't read her books yet but Shiver is definitely on my TBR, so the chance to meet her had me all excited. Little did I know she was bringing some friends:

(left to right: Jackson Pearce, Maggie Stiefvater, and Carrie Ryan)

Excuse my bad camera skillz, they were so entertaining I kept forgetting to take pictures! They each told funny stories about being an author and answered some of the most common questions they get. I really enjoyed seeing them interact with each other - as I watched and listened, I thought to myself "This is a perfect example of how women should treat each other - they're incredibly supportive and genuinely like each other."

Maggie talked about how she used to hate the question, "what made you decide to write this book?", until she met an author she admired, Melina Marchetta, who wrote Saving Francesca. She was thrilled to be speaking with Ms. Marchetta, and asked, "What made you decide to write this book?" and had an "ah-ha" momet. (I had to chuckle, because as she was speaking, it popped into my head that I thought this was the book that Danielle at Alpha Reader had gushed about this book several months ago; then Maggie mentioned Melina was Australian, at which point I thought "Bingo!")

Carrie Ryan was sooo nice, she actually approached us while we were looking at the books for sale, trying to decide if The Dead Tossed Waves was a follow-up to The Forest of Hands and Teeth or a separate book. She told a very entertaining story about how she ended up writing about Zombies, and talked about her upcoming short story in Zombies vs.Unicorns, which looks like it's got some great authors on board! And she wrote a really nice dedication to my son (and his bum leg) when she signed his books for me.

Jackson Pearce is a new-to-me author, she wrote As You Wish, a book about genies. She also talked about working with editors and when asked what book she wished she'd written, her answer was "Harry Potter", of course everyone laughed!

Now, I haven't read Shiver yet, but apparently one of the characters writes notes to himself on his hand? Look closely at the picture below:


It was hard to get a good picture where you could see there was something there, but apparently that is a story idea that will (hopefully) be going into Forever, the third book in The Wolves of Mercy Falls series. The whole time she talked, she moved her hands around, behind her, one hand over the other, and I couldn't help wondering how many ideas she'd accidentally wiped off, until she mentioned it's on there in Sharpie ink.

AND, while I was there I got to meet one of my fellow New Orleans- area bloggers: Parajunkee!
I have to tell you, Rachel has some crazy good marketing skills - she had absolutely adorable bookmarks and business cards that she gave to the authors. Why didn't I think of that?!? She told me that this was her first signing; I've gone to a few so apparently I'm on the slow end of the learning curve. Rachel put up a few good pics and some more info in her post here.

(Me and Parajunkee with our loot!)

I really hope this is the start of more authors coming to New Orleans. The gathering for this group was intimate (read: small) but there really wasn't any promo - as I said at the beginning of the post I found out by accident!