MWT visits NorCal!

[anon8.livejournal.com]

Thank you octopirock for letting us know that Megan was coming, and thank you so very, very much Megan for taking the time to answer our questions and chat with us :D.  It was sooo cool to actually, finally, meet you!

So, octopirock and I waited excitedly at Cody’s Bookstore yesterday afternoon.  As there were only a few people browsing, and I was re-reading KoA, and she was holding The Thief and QoA with the new covers, it wasn’t too hard for us to find each other.  When Megan arrived, she already knew who we were because she had sent the email to octopirock and she had checked the comm and read the comments to the post before she came. :D

Megan graciously signed our books, noticed Octopirock wearing her signature button, and asked us how we started reading/were introduced to her books.  Then we decided to go and take a look at the “empty spot” on the shelf where Megan’s books should have been sitting in all their glory.  Empty spot because Cody’s had sold out of the KoA and had only 1 copy of the reissued The Thief and QoA each.

So when she asked the store clerk to search how many copies of the three books were left in stock, and clerk’s like, “uh, Megan Turner’s books?” and she says “yes…I’m Megan Turner—I was going to autograph some of them?”  He looked like he really wished there were more books sitting on the shelf.  Cody’s actually has “autographed!” stickers to stick on the book covers.

More questions: writing a short story versus a long novel

She says that short stories take blocks of uninterrupted quiet time for her to write them, which is now harder to come by.  For the novel-length stories, she needs a block of time to lay down a draft to frame the story, but after that’s done, she can work on it in smaller snatches of time between say, folding laundry and planning dinner.  Instead of Three Wishes was a collection of short stories she had told her husband over time, and decided to write them down as sort of a writing exercise, not because she originally planned to publish them.  Megan mentioned that she hadn’t seen collections of short stories being ordered by bookstores, sitting on shelves, so she didn’t think that her stories were publishable.  She sent them to Diane Wynne Jones, who liked them so much she sent them to Sharyn November, her editor (who is now the editor of the Firebirds collections, new one just came out).

octopirock and I exclaimed how we loved the new cover art for the series, and she really likes them too, though she wondered how it would be possible to hide a stone that big behind your head, à la The Thief cover.  We all agreed the QoA cover is a bit creepy, and the scene it depicts never really happens in the book, unlike the other two covers, but when the artist asked if she wanted it changed, Megan decided she’d go with the artist’s opinion of the rendition.  She says she doesn’t like to meddle with the artist’s rendition because she feels they know more about artistic depictions than she does.  For KoA, the pommel for sword was originally round, and she liked it that way, but it was changed to the current look because it was more historically accurate…which the artist thought was more important to her.  She prefers the better looking, round one.  Have you all seen the old cover for Instead of Three Wishes? It’s got little depictions of the stories, hovering in a cloud over an ice-cream cone with a pair of eyes staring out above them.  While the mini-depictions were more accurate than the ones on the paperback cover (6 colored panels), she didn’t like the overall effect of the cover.  For the paperback, however, Megan said it looked like the artist hadn’t read some of the stories that were being illustrated ^ ^ but she liked the overall effect better.

So…why did we have to wait so long for The King of Attolia?

Well, her husband went on sabbatical for a year, and they moved to California.  She wasn’t expecting to stay for a really long time, so she didn’t start the drafting/framing for KoA, especially since she was so busy with moving and transferring and such.  Her husband ended up commuting between Maryland and California for his work, so then she really didn’t have time to draft.  Thankfully, help arrived in the form of Liz Cretti!  She offered to babysit and took the kids to her place, which had a pool :), so Megan was free to work from 9 to 1.  yay  Once she got the drafting done, she could edit and work on it in small bits of time, even after they ended up moving to Ohio.

deleted scenes...it doesn’t sound like a Director’s Cut is forthcoming, but there’s always the possibility of them showing up in the next books.  The scene where Eugenides yanks Laecdomon’s wooden sword out of his hand and knocks the wind out of him with it?  Originally, Megan wanted Gen to do that to snotty Ambiades, but decided that there was no call for it, so out it went.

Yes there are more books in the series ^_____^, but she’s not sure if the next one she writes will be one of them, or if she is going to try writing something different before coming back to them.  But she promises she’ll finish them eventually! :DDD

Megan is very well read—she talked about some really cool books (sorry, don’t remember, Octopirock – help me out here): Lynne Ray Perkins’s books All Alone in the Universe and Criss Cross (recent Newbery Medal) have as their premise what initially most people consider *yawn* dull story lines, but Megan assures us that by the time you finish them, you will realize they are a great read, having been skillfully taken through the development of the characters.  We also talked about A Girl Named Disaster (Nancy Farmer), and compared The Giver (how Lois Lowry moves away from a technological society feel to a more fantasy-story feel) with The Eye, the Ear, and the Arm (Nancy Farmer).  Oh, another bit of inspiration for Eugenides—Master Robinton, the Masterharper of Pern (Anne McCaffrey’s books), who somehow manages to read people correctly, think up great plans, and manage miscellaneous affairs of practically all of Pern while sipping lots and lots of wine, for which he has a very discriminating palate :D.

I think that’s most of it.  Of course, this can’t do justice to the continuous giddy feeling one has while actually talking to one’s favorite author face to face.  Megan is totally cool and very easy to chat with.  We hope she comes back sometime in the future!

Oh, somebody asked if she’d do a book signing or at least a visit to Maryland? Yes…

[This was where I had inserted the picture, but apparently I need to host them somewhere other than my harddrive…veteran lj users, a little help here?]  Speaking of pictures, Megan was...displeased...when she found out that they had put her picture on the back of the hardcover QoA.  Sure, they had asked her to submit author pictures, so she knew they had them...she just didn't think they would cover the whole back of the book with it.  The upside: she had an armload of books she was checking out for her children, but had forgetten her library card, so the librarian wanted a photo ID, but having forgotten her wallet, she had neither.  She picked up a hardcover QoA "see, it's me" -- it worked. :D

to fabricalchemist: Megan wore sort of rectangular silver earrings that had a solid diagonal across the middle and filigree-type design above and below the diagonal