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queensthiefSo I posted the pictures, and now here's the words to go with 'em.
The where/when/what:
Anderson's Bookshop
Naperville, IL
Wednesday, August 8, 2012 (7:00pm)
Meet & Greet/Book-signing with Megan Whalen Turner!
Sounisians present:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
freenarnian (me), ladraove (of the great smile and epic brown scrubs!) and lurker Priya (we love lurkers... used to be one myself...) Chime in if you were there and I missed you!
I'd say approx 20 people were there, including my party of 9, though I didn't do an official headcount.
Before I get started, allow me this one disclaimer: I'm recording this all from memory, a week after the fact, with the help of my friends' recollections. Someday, I will learn to take notes! Until then, this account is patchy at best. (Again, if you were there and remember something I left out, chime in!) Also, I sat myself down and gave some thought to whether there was anything I should omit, knowing how Megan likes tobe mysterious keep a low internet profile... and really, I couldn't think of anything. Everyone there seemed aware (or possibly scared) of the Not Telling policy. :)
So, so, so:
My friends and I arrived at the bookshop at precisely 7:00, after an hour and then some in traffic (but we knew it would be worth it). I was wandering toward the back of the store, looking for the seating area, when a lovely face in one of the aisles turned towards me and... I realized I was looking at the author herself! I'm pretty sure I startled her for a moment with my outburst of "HI!! I'M FREENARNIAN FROM SOUNIS AND YOU'RE MEGAN WHALEN TURNER BUT YOU KNEW THAT ALREADY AND HERE ARE ALL OF MY FRIENDS TOO!" (Sorry, Megan!) Then I went back to being my somewhat shy self while Megan greeted everyone and everyone grinned and blinked back at her in a state of happy shock. Then she excused herself, as she was on an errand to collect some books to discuss during her talk, and we filled the extra two rows of chairs the store kindly brought out for us (way to double demand, yo). (Actually, we raided the YA section first, to pick up various copies of her books... and ran into her again... I promise we weren't stalking... and my favorite moment of the evening was when she took the copy of Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith that I was showing to my friends. There was a time, before we all discovered MWT's books, when Crown Duel was the It Book amongst us, and it's always fun when you meet someone else who likes it, especially when that someone is MWT! Anyway, moving on...)
Books Megan talked about (the ones I remember):
- Eragon by Christopher Paolini
- Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
- The Floating Islands - Rachel Neumeier
- The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones (and another... I think it may have been Dark Lord of Derkholm)
- Crown Duel - Sherwood Smith
- Shiver, Lament, and Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater
- White Cat - Holly Black
- Kiki Strike - Kristen Miller
- Girl of Fire & Thorns - Rae Carson
She mentioned the amount of book recommending that goes on here at Sounis, and how similar our tastes tend to run... with exceptions like Eragon vs. Twilight. Apparently there's a divide... her readers tend to like one or the other, but not both. (I guess I would fall somewhat awkwardly into the Eragon camp.) She had nice things to say about both, however: She looks forward to seeing what Paolini writes now that he's finished with the Inheritance Cycle, and Meyer writes purple prose really, really, really well. ;) (Insert funny story here, in which she was stuck alone in a hotel room with Twilight and decided to read it.)
She was full of praise for Jones, Smith, Miller, and Stiefvater, but said she liked Stiefvater's Lament and Ballad better than the Shiver trilogy. I've forgotten the exact reason she gave, but I remember her saying something about liking the sarcastic kid who plays the bagpipes. (It's been a while since I read Lament but I remember liking him too!) I didn't get a chance to ask her if she'd read The Scorpio Races... it's by far my favorite book by Stiefvater. Just sayin'.
She hadn't finished reading The Floating Islands but said it reminded her of Patricia McKillip's earlier novels, and she liked it so far.
She went on to say some great things about so-called "boy books" vs. "girl books" and why it's silly to place books so rigidly in one category or the other. Everyone knows that girls read "boy books". And from MWT's experience raising sons, she knows boys will read certain kinds of "girl books". She gave Kiki Strike as an example of a book her son loved, whereas "he wouldn't touch Girl of Fire & Thorns with a ten-foot pole". A lot of it has to do with how confident the female protagonist is, how exciting the story is, vs. how sappy/emotional/angsty it is.
When she finished her talk, we were assigned numbers which were then drawn from (a hat? bowl? mug? round-ish object?) in exchange for shiny foreign additions! I got The Thief in Japanese! (Yuuuuss!)
After that she took questions, and that's when I really wished I had brought a notepad and pen for jotting down the details of her answers (which were wonderfully insightful and/or detailed).
- Someone asked her about her experience of living in Norway. She talked about how unfailingly polite the people in Norway are, and how this effects the cultural atmosphere. She also talked about their traditional fairy tales, and the common theme of being polite, good, kind, etc., instead of being the "ash lad", so-called because he sits idly and pokes at the fire. She retold the tale of a boy who leaves home to make his way in the world. In the first village he comes to he discovers a dead man encased in a pillar of ice, and entreats the people in the village to give the man a proper burial. This being done, he embarks on whatever quest (saving the princess, or some such) and is helped three times by a clever fox. At the end of the tale, the fox turns out to be the spirit of the dead man, repaying the boy for his good deed.
- Someone asked her if she thinks travel is good for writers... the short answer was "Yes".
- I asked her if there was anything about the writing/publishing process she wished she'd known when she first started out (when she was doing the "writing exercises" that eventually became Instead of Three Wishes.) The short answer: "No." I guess that shows me! ;P She did lament/joke about wishing she wrote faster...but, she has good reasons for taking her time. For example: "I have three children who might survive to adulthood!" Everyone got a good laugh out of that!
- My friend asked her about methods of introducing young children to books, and she replied with her own experience as the youngest child in her family, having the adults play audiobooks for her. (This struck a chord with me, as I wasn't interested in reading until I heard the Focus on the Family Radio Theatre adaption of Prince Caspian when I was like, 10 or 11, during a roadtrip in my friend's car. So yay for audiobooks!) She also talked about reading being a private experience, and letting young readers be alone with their books. I thought it was a great answer!
- Surprisingly, no major questions about the Queen's Thief series or her future books were asked!
I'm sure there were more questions... but I'm not recalling them at this time.
And then we got in line to have our books signed and pictures taken before the bookstore closed... and all in all, it was a great event with a truly kind, witty, intelligent author and everyone enjoyed it! Thanks again, Megan, for taking the time to meet up with your Chicago-area admirers! Let's do it again sometime! :) (You may even get more earrings out of it!) (Whut? Me? Bribing Megan? Nooo...)
And hey, did anyone go to LeakyCon and see Megan there? If so, please tell us about it!
The where/when/what:
Anderson's Bookshop
Naperville, IL
Wednesday, August 8, 2012 (7:00pm)
Meet & Greet/Book-signing with Megan Whalen Turner!
Sounisians present:
freenarnian (me), ladraove (of the great smile and epic brown scrubs!) and lurker Priya (we love lurkers... used to be one myself...) Chime in if you were there and I missed you!I'd say approx 20 people were there, including my party of 9, though I didn't do an official headcount.
Before I get started, allow me this one disclaimer: I'm recording this all from memory, a week after the fact, with the help of my friends' recollections. Someday, I will learn to take notes! Until then, this account is patchy at best. (Again, if you were there and remember something I left out, chime in!) Also, I sat myself down and gave some thought to whether there was anything I should omit, knowing how Megan likes to
So, so, so:
My friends and I arrived at the bookshop at precisely 7:00, after an hour and then some in traffic (but we knew it would be worth it). I was wandering toward the back of the store, looking for the seating area, when a lovely face in one of the aisles turned towards me and... I realized I was looking at the author herself! I'm pretty sure I startled her for a moment with my outburst of "HI!! I'M FREENARNIAN FROM SOUNIS AND YOU'RE MEGAN WHALEN TURNER BUT YOU KNEW THAT ALREADY AND HERE ARE ALL OF MY FRIENDS TOO!" (Sorry, Megan!) Then I went back to being my somewhat shy self while Megan greeted everyone and everyone grinned and blinked back at her in a state of happy shock. Then she excused herself, as she was on an errand to collect some books to discuss during her talk, and we filled the extra two rows of chairs the store kindly brought out for us (way to double demand, yo). (Actually, we raided the YA section first, to pick up various copies of her books... and ran into her again... I promise we weren't stalking... and my favorite moment of the evening was when she took the copy of Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith that I was showing to my friends. There was a time, before we all discovered MWT's books, when Crown Duel was the It Book amongst us, and it's always fun when you meet someone else who likes it, especially when that someone is MWT! Anyway, moving on...)
Books Megan talked about (the ones I remember):
- Eragon by Christopher Paolini
- Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
- The Floating Islands - Rachel Neumeier
- The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones (and another... I think it may have been Dark Lord of Derkholm)
- Crown Duel - Sherwood Smith
- Shiver, Lament, and Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater
- White Cat - Holly Black
- Kiki Strike - Kristen Miller
- Girl of Fire & Thorns - Rae Carson
She mentioned the amount of book recommending that goes on here at Sounis, and how similar our tastes tend to run... with exceptions like Eragon vs. Twilight. Apparently there's a divide... her readers tend to like one or the other, but not both. (I guess I would fall somewhat awkwardly into the Eragon camp.) She had nice things to say about both, however: She looks forward to seeing what Paolini writes now that he's finished with the Inheritance Cycle, and Meyer writes purple prose really, really, really well. ;) (Insert funny story here, in which she was stuck alone in a hotel room with Twilight and decided to read it.)
She was full of praise for Jones, Smith, Miller, and Stiefvater, but said she liked Stiefvater's Lament and Ballad better than the Shiver trilogy. I've forgotten the exact reason she gave, but I remember her saying something about liking the sarcastic kid who plays the bagpipes. (It's been a while since I read Lament but I remember liking him too!) I didn't get a chance to ask her if she'd read The Scorpio Races... it's by far my favorite book by Stiefvater. Just sayin'.
She hadn't finished reading The Floating Islands but said it reminded her of Patricia McKillip's earlier novels, and she liked it so far.
She went on to say some great things about so-called "boy books" vs. "girl books" and why it's silly to place books so rigidly in one category or the other. Everyone knows that girls read "boy books". And from MWT's experience raising sons, she knows boys will read certain kinds of "girl books". She gave Kiki Strike as an example of a book her son loved, whereas "he wouldn't touch Girl of Fire & Thorns with a ten-foot pole". A lot of it has to do with how confident the female protagonist is, how exciting the story is, vs. how sappy/emotional/angsty it is.
When she finished her talk, we were assigned numbers which were then drawn from (a hat? bowl? mug? round-ish object?) in exchange for shiny foreign additions! I got The Thief in Japanese! (Yuuuuss!)
After that she took questions, and that's when I really wished I had brought a notepad and pen for jotting down the details of her answers (which were wonderfully insightful and/or detailed).
- Someone asked her about her experience of living in Norway. She talked about how unfailingly polite the people in Norway are, and how this effects the cultural atmosphere. She also talked about their traditional fairy tales, and the common theme of being polite, good, kind, etc., instead of being the "ash lad", so-called because he sits idly and pokes at the fire. She retold the tale of a boy who leaves home to make his way in the world. In the first village he comes to he discovers a dead man encased in a pillar of ice, and entreats the people in the village to give the man a proper burial. This being done, he embarks on whatever quest (saving the princess, or some such) and is helped three times by a clever fox. At the end of the tale, the fox turns out to be the spirit of the dead man, repaying the boy for his good deed.
- Someone asked her if she thinks travel is good for writers... the short answer was "Yes".
- I asked her if there was anything about the writing/publishing process she wished she'd known when she first started out (when she was doing the "writing exercises" that eventually became Instead of Three Wishes.) The short answer: "No." I guess that shows me! ;P She did lament/joke about wishing she wrote faster...but, she has good reasons for taking her time. For example: "I have three children who might survive to adulthood!" Everyone got a good laugh out of that!
- My friend asked her about methods of introducing young children to books, and she replied with her own experience as the youngest child in her family, having the adults play audiobooks for her. (This struck a chord with me, as I wasn't interested in reading until I heard the Focus on the Family Radio Theatre adaption of Prince Caspian when I was like, 10 or 11, during a roadtrip in my friend's car. So yay for audiobooks!) She also talked about reading being a private experience, and letting young readers be alone with their books. I thought it was a great answer!
- Surprisingly, no major questions about the Queen's Thief series or her future books were asked!
I'm sure there were more questions... but I'm not recalling them at this time.
And then we got in line to have our books signed and pictures taken before the bookstore closed... and all in all, it was a great event with a truly kind, witty, intelligent author and everyone enjoyed it! Thanks again, Megan, for taking the time to meet up with your Chicago-area admirers! Let's do it again sometime! :) (You may even get more earrings out of it!) (Whut? Me? Bribing Megan? Nooo...)
And hey, did anyone go to LeakyCon and see Megan there? If so, please tell us about it!
no subject
Date: 9/1/12 09:52 pm (UTC)I so would have loved to have gone, but had some really bad personal stuff, besides which it's almost impossible for me to go anywhere in the summer, unless I plan many months in advance.... Public librarians are pretty much stuck in their libraries over the summer and can't get out until school starts. (Though Mary & I did make it to Terminus years ago with our Wizard Rock band, but that's another story ;-) )
It's great to have such a detailed write up, and pictures! Thanks again, & have a good weekend.
D