On Tuesday, I had the chance to go an event at my library with Cinda Williams Chima as the featured guest. She’s the author of the Heir Chronicles and the Seven Realms Quartet. I was really excited to go because one of my blogger buddies, Emily from Emily’s Reading Room, told me that her books are fantastic. I have to take her word for it because I haven’t read them yet. But, the event was fun anyway.

I always look forward to these events, even when I haven’t read the books, because I not only get to meet great authors, but I also get to hang out with friends. I got to see my really good friend, and aspiring author, Rachel and her daughter. I also got to hang out with a couple of my book blogger buddies: Jenny of Alternate Readality, Suey of It’s All About Books, and Emily (mentioned above).

Chima talked about how she has been writing stories since she was in the third grade and her first novels were written during junior high. Her novels were romance and they starred her and her friends and they always ended up with the cute guy. She then said she took a break for a little while before she started writing again. She decided to write YA fantasy because she wanted to write something her two teenage boys would enjoy reading.

After her first book, The Warrior Heir, was published, she started to write the Seven Realms. She took the story from a 500,000-word tome she had written prior to being published and prior to writing the Heir Chronicles. This tome was an adult high fantasy story. She used a lot of her research and character development from this tome to come up with the published Seven Realms, a YA high fantasy series.

The Seven Realms was meant to be a trilogy, but when she realized she was already 500 pages into The Gray Wolf Throne (the third book in the series) and no closer to wrapping things up, the series morphed into a quartet. The Crimson Crown is scheduled to be released Fall 2012. We got to see a preliminary mockup of the cover, and it’s really cool. (She also informed us that the Heir Chronicles will have two more stories added to the current trilogy.)

She also talked about how she uses her real-life experiences to dream up her stories and worlds. She gave an example of her grandmother who was said to have second sight and would read cards to tell people’s fortunes, which ended up in one of her novels. She also uses familiar landscapes, such as the New Zealand greenery and mountains and Yellowstone’s geysers and hotspots, to create and describe the worlds in her books.

I found it interesting that she has a twin sister Linda and is the older of the two. Most people think she was named Cinda to rhyme with Linda. In reality, she was named first and named after Cinda from House Divided. (I also loved finding out that she’s a lefty, like I am, when she signed my books. It gave us something to talk about since I haven’t read her books yet.)

I look forward to reading her books. In fact, I bought The Warrior Heir and The Demon King to get them signed. To my surprise, I was one of the raffle winners and won a copy of The Exiled Queen to add to my library. I was very excited to win, which my friends can attest to.

On Friday, some of my friends and I had the chance to go to an event hosted by my library with Ally Carter, the author of the Gallagher Girls and Heist Society series, as the guest of honor. I was really excited to go as I had heard so many good things about her books. (I’m nearly done with Heist Society right now and I’m really liking it so far.)

When Ally Carter was introduced, all those in attendance who didn’t forget to bring their big sunglasses (thank you, Debbie, for letting me borrow yours so I could stay in the second row) put them on so we could greet Ally that way. It was a lot of fun to see her reaction as we all put them on at the same time.

Ally is a fantastic speaker and one of the first things she said was that she doesn’t like to bore people will all the details and background information, both in speaking and writing. She just likes to get down to business and so we went right into the Q&A. There were a lot of great questions asked at the event and I love the way she answered them. She’s hilarious and just has a great way about her. If she was nervous, I didn’t notice because she was just super fun and bubbly the entire time.

Here are the questions and answers that I thought were the most interesting:

• Someone asked how she researches for her stories since they’re about spies and thieves. She answered that she does a lot of googling and watching capers. She also said she’s probably on NSA watch lists with all the things she googles.
• Someone asked if the love triangle between Kat, Hale, and Nick is ever compared to the love triangle in Twilight. She said that she doesn’t think there’s a love triangle because, “Dude! Hale!” She thinks that Hale is threatened by Nick, but there’s no contest because, “Dude! Hale!” But, she’s glad that people interpret her books the way they want to.
• She was asked if she could be anyone in any one of her books, who she’d choose. She said that she’d want to be Kat, go to Gallagher Academy, and date Joe Solomon.

As she was talking, she gave a lot of great advice to aspiring authors. She told a story of how she was writing a story when she was in high school and became frustrated that it wasn’t as good as To Kill a Mockingbird, her favorite book. Her mother told her to never compare someone’s finished work with her first draft because you don’t know what that person’s first draft looked like. She also said that the single most important piece of advice she can give to aspiring authors is to stop talking and thinking about writing and just start writing, just get it on paper; it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time through.

And, for those of you who live in Utah or are members of the LDS Church, this piece of information may be interesting to you. Before she started to write Heist Society, she still had her day job and was in Utah on a business trip. The people who hosted her took her to Temple Square and the LDS Church museums so she could learn a little more about Utah and Salt Lake City. While she was exploring the museums, she saw the name “Hale” on one of the placards and it stood out in her mind as a great name for the character Hale.

Even though a couple of my friends couldn’t make it and I missed having them there, I had a great time. It was a fantastic evening and time well spent with friends and an amazing author. I’m super excited to read all of her books now.

On Thursday, I had the opportunity to attend the book launch party for Emily Wing Smith’s second book Back When You Were Easier to Love at The King’s English in Salt Lake.

I didn’t think I was going to be able to go because my car couldn’t make the “long” trek to Salt Lake. Luckily, one of my fellow book bloggers Suey said I could hitch a ride from her and off we went to the book launch party with another fellow book blogger Jenny.

At the party, Emily talked about how Back When You Were Easier to Love came about. She said that it took her ten years to write (not non-stop as she already has another book–The Way He Lived–published). Back When You Were Easier to Love went through many different iterations, mostly in its structure and how the story was told. Emily tried to write the story chronologically at first, but it didn’t work. She wanted to convey the protagonist’s character (Joy) in a way that allowed the reader to experience her in the present and past but still as the present because in Joy’s mind the events of the book all happen “now.” (I hope that made sense. Emily did a much better job of explaining it.) Emily also said that, in some ways, Joy was based on her, but everything that happened in her own life was edited out of the final publication. Emily also read an excerpt from the book. You can listen to it here if you’d like.

At some point, the characters end up in Las Vegas and either see one of Barry Manilow’s shows or something happens that involves Barry Manilow in some way. Because of this scene, Emily and her writing critique group wrote a song (to the tune of Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana”) to help promote the story and just to do something fun and different. (You have to know her and her critique group to appreciate the craziness of this. I’ve been friends with a couple of people in her group–Brodi Ashton and Bree Despain–for a while and I follow them on their blog. Brodi talks about all their crazy adventures as “The SIX”–the name of their critique group–and I’d been anticipating this performance for a few weeks.)

For the event, they named themselves the Barely Manilows (from left to right: Brodi Ashton, Valynne Maetani, Emily Wing Smith, Sara Bolton, Kimberly Reid, Bree Despain) and wore matching Barry Manilow shirts and matching shoes that match the book cover.

After the performance, Emily signed books. She had quite a following of friends, family, fellow authors, readers, and book bloggers. Utah is so great in its support for local authors and it’s always great to see that support at these events.

While waiting in line, I got to talk with Brodi and Bree for a little bit. We reminisced about the time when I referred to Brandon Mull as “He Who Must Not be Named” and that I meant to tell it to Matthew Kirby while he was at this signing because he actually is “He Who Must Not be Named” (at least on Brodi’s blog). At that point, Brodi couldn’t remember if it was Matthew Kirby she referred to on her blog as that or if it was James Dashner. James Dashner overheard us and wanted to know why we were talking about him and Bree told him it was because he was a name whore. :lol: He got a kick out of that after we explained what we were talking about. (You may have had to be there to appreciate this little tidbit, but I didn’t want to forget about it.) I always feel like I’m a part of the “in” crowd when I’m with Brodi and Bree.

Anyway, it was a ton of fun and I’m glad I could go to show my support for Emily. I can’t wait to read her book (one of these days when I catch up on my current reading :lol: ).