Come See Me in Lexington, Ky and Sylva, NC

The Dragon Heir is on sale!

I’ll be at Joseph-Beth at Lexington Green, Lexington, Ky, Saturday, August 16, 2 p.m. and at City Lights Books in Sylva, NC. Monday, August 18, 6 p.m.

I'll be back in Ohio at The Learned Owl Bookshop in Hudson, OH August 23, 11-1.

These friends and Heir fans helped launch Dragon Heir August 12 at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cleveland. Looks like a tough crowd!

But they warmed up as I spoke and read from Dragon Heir.

Followed by a book signing. The two kids I'm talking to are going into fifth grade. One of them has already emailed me to say he's finished Wizard Heir in two days.

Hope to see you at one of my upcoming events!

Shopping Impaired

I am shopping impaired. I blame it on my mom, who never mentored me in the shopping tradition. We never went out clothes shopping, because she made all of our clothes. We’d go to the fabric store, and sit and flip through the pattern books. If I found something I wanted, then we’d look for a compatible fabric and notions.

There was no need to go beyond the two or three fabric stores available to us. The pattern books were pretty much the same everywhere. There was no ritual “trying on” of clothes, no vetting of what I chose by a committee of peers, no need for anyone to go fetch another size while I lurked half-naked in a dressing room. If I needed/desired a change in a collar or a hemline or short sleeves instead of long, that would happen on the cutting table or at the sewing machine.

The big downside was that it was sometimes hard to predict how a style would work in a particular fabric. Or whether it would flatter my vertically-challenged frame.

The notion of recreational shopping is foreign to me. It’s not that I don’t like bling, or cool clothes, or sexy shoes—I do!! I want to HAVE them, not SHOP for them. It’s all about outcome, not process. I like to do my research ahead of time. I want to know exactly what I’m looking for when I leave the house, and exactly where I’m going to go to get it. So traveling in a shopping pack is counterproductive. It just takes longer.

This week I went shopping for a bathing suit, since we’re planning to spend two weeks at the beach this summer. I went into the department store, grimly determined to come away with a bathing suit that wouldn’t require me to huddle in a cabana with a towel drawn up to my chin. I went alone, knowing I would have to try on approximately 125 bathing suits to achieve this.

This is fun?

There is one exception to this anti-shopping bias--bookstores. I love to browse in bookstores. I love the smell of books, the way the spine crackles when they’ve never been opened before, the texture of rough-cut pages, the weight of a volume in my hands, the aggressive artwork in picture books. I like being in a community of other bookstore browsers.

Shopping in a bookstore is the perfect marriage of process AND outcome—bliss.

Breaking News

Breaking News

I’ve just accepted an offer from Hyperion Books for Children for a new 3-book high fantasy series set in the Fells, a mountainous queendom in the Land Between the Waters. More to come on that.

Students at Smithfield Middle School near Dallas-Fort Worth created a book trailer for The Warrior Heir for a school project. You can view the video on YouTube at http://youtube.com/watch?v=BTSpzjzbDPo

Spanish language and Portuguese translation rights for The Warrior Heir have recently sold to Via Magna in Barcelona and Difusão Cultural do Livro Ltda in Sao Paulo, Brazil, respectively.

We have an official release date for The Dragon Heir. It will be published September 8, 2008.

I’ll be visiting Isaac Newton Middle School in Centennial, CO January 10, 2008. I’ll be appearing at Barnes & Noble, Littleton, CO Wednesday, January 9 at 7 p.m.

There was just a big debate on a writer’s email list I’m on about author visits. The question was, If I write for children and teens, do I have to do school, bookstore, and library visits?

Some authors love to meet the public, and others don’t. Either way, the potential for humiliation is great. I’ve heard a story about an author who came into a classroom and was asked if she was the substitute teacher. Clearly, the class had not been prepped for her visit!

The travel thing can be grueling and difficult to coordinate with other responsibilities. The hardest thing for me is when I'm being hosted by someone who is embarrassed about a small turnout. They keep apologizing and I'm like, Who can predict these things? I've spoken to groups that consist of the librarian and her sister and others where there are 150 kids (school visit or joint school-library program.)

I’ve had unexpected blessings. I once did a school and library program in this tiny town in southern Ohio. It was so small I had to stay across the river. The town was run by these six powerful sisters-one was a librarian at the county library, one was a librarian at the middle school, one was married to the high school principal, one was the English teacher, the sister in law was the library director. They were the literary and educational aristocracy in that town, and they were powerful. These women pre-sold scads of books, and the entire 6th grade had read my book when I arrived.

I did a writing workshop at a school in San Antonio, and those 6th graders could hardly stay in their seats, they were so excited about writing and sharing what they’d written. And I spoke at a library in Youngstown for Teen Reads Week to a huge crowd of students brought in for the occasion. The library staff made me feel like a celebrity. At a teen book club I spoke to a boy who was so excited about the new fantasy book he’d just read that he wanted to give me his copy so I could read it.

I did a bookstore visit in a nearby small town and a few of my friends showed up and a couple people I didn't even know who saw it in the paper. The store clerk seemed really pleased, so I asked how many people usually show for a booksigning, and she said, "None."

I was a reading nerd when I was a teenager, but I never got to meet an author. I didn’t know where all the authors lived, but I was sure it was nowhere near me. So I do like meeting kids who love books, and who want to write books of their own, because I see my 14-year-old self in every one of them.