First – I am blushing and squirming profusely as I do this, but Betsy Bird posted an incredibly detailed and generous review of CHAINS. Thank you, Betsy!
The weekend sort of didn’t exist for me because I spent most of it rushing hither and yon. Saturday morning I flew to Detroit and then took a cab to Dearborn for the Great Lakes Bookseller’s Association annual tradeshow. I hung out with Sarah Miller and ran into Jaime Adoff, who has produced both a new book and (with considerable help from his wife) a new baby this year.
Early galleys of David Macinnis Gill’s Soul Enchilada were there! (Click on the link to see the real cover, which is v. cool.) I toured the floor, signed a couple hundred copies of CHAINS, soaked my hand in ice-cold water, then spent a looooong time on the treadmill so my legs would be as tired as my signing hand.
The big event was Sunday – the booksellers gathered for one of the nicest conference breakfasts I’ve ever eaten, thanks to the generosity of Bookazine. While the booksellers enjoyed their sausage, eggs, and way too many pastries, I grabbed the microphone and talked about the reasons I wrote CHAINS, then Suzanne Collins talked about the writing of HUNGER GAMES, and Jerry Pinkney showed us his process and motivation for his new book, THE MOON OVER STAR.
We were all very happy when the speaking part was over.
I also got to meet Kathe Koja, seen here between Sarah Miller and me.
Two weeks from today I leave on the CHAINS book tour! Yikes! I need to write many, many pages before then. I also need to find the appropriate tour sneakers. Anyone know where I can find a pair of sizzling, baby-blue high-tops, women’s size 10 or men’s 8? Oh, and I need a couple of shirts that won’t wrinkle. But mostly I have to write oodles of pages.
Thanks for taking and posting the photo of the ARCs. My heart is all aflutter.
Are you looking for basketball style or converse? If you’re looking for leather, my students have those shoes and they get them at the Nike Store. You’d be looking for Forces or Dunks. If you’re looking for Chucks, Amazon has baby blue converse all-stars.
This weekend kicked butt. Just so you know.
by sneakers do you mean chucks?? because on the converse website, you can design custom pairs. it’s pretty cool, at least pretty fun to pretend you’ve designed a pair of hot shoes when all you’ve really done is click the color/pattern options 🙂
sounds like you had a great weekend! and have fun on the book tour-let me know when/if you’ll be at moravian college so i can come see you! =) ♥
That review made me really excited for Chains! Congratulations!
I am so sad that I didn’t know you were coming to Michigan. You were practically right around the corner from one of your biggest fans!