Ten Years

I’ve lived in Cincinnati for years, but it wasn’t until last January that I discovered all the young adult writers in this city. Now, about a year later, I’m still not sure I’m one of their group (what with not having an agent or published book), but they treat me like I am and I love to support them. That’s why, in the last three days, I’ve been to two book launches.

First, Melissa Landers’ launch of INVADED, the sequel to her YA sci-fi ALIENATED, was Saturday afternoon at the Barnes & Noble in West Chester.

I’d bought ALIENATED before I met her, when I’d found a signed copy at a different Barnes& Noble, and loved it. I’d talked to her a couple of times about her INVADED launch, about the story itself and the writing of it, but Saturday I still enjoyed listening to her discuss other aspects of it. She also read a passage, explained the origins of the alien language in the series, and teased us with a description of her next book, which will release next year.

As much as I was there to support Melissa Landers, I was also there to chat with the other Cincinnati YA authors. I wanted to learn more about their newest books and glean what information I could about writer life on the other side (the agented/published side). I also had a couple of query questions, which they enthusiastically answered. I may not be agented yet, but they’re determined to help me get there.

At some point, one of the authors mentioned that they’d be attending another launch (for another Cincinnati YA author that I hadn’t met) on Tuesday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Rookwood, my favorite independent bookstore. I promised I’d be there.

Yesterday evening, Joseph-Beth and Kristen Simmons launched her YA dystopian novel THE GLASS ARROW.

Of all that Kristen Simmons discussed—how grateful she is for the support of her friends and family, her other books, her inspiration, how so many people will let you do just about anything for writing research—what I latched onto most was that it took her ten years to find an agent and publish her first book. Ten years. And now, including THE GLASS ARROW, she’s written and published four books.

After she talked and read from her book, once I’d waited in line to get her autograph, I asked her about those ten years. We only had a few minutes (a small line of people behind me), but she expressed her empathy and gave me a few pieces of querying advice. But the biggest thing, the best part? She wrote this inside my copy of her book:

I won’t give up. I’ve said it many times before and I mean it as much as ever. (Never give up, never surrender! as they say in Galaxy Quest.) I’ll keep going to book launches and signings. I’ll keep talking with authors and listening to the advice they give me. And I’ll query and query and query, for as long as it takes, even if it’s ten years.

a FAIREST evening

Once upon a time, at an enchanted bookstore named Joseph-Beth in the enchanted city of Cincinnati…

Okay, actually, I’ll stop there. I’m not great at writing fairy tales; Marissa Meyer, on the other hand, is amazing at futuristic fairy tale retellings. For a long time, I didn’t know this. When the first book in her Lunar Chronicles series was released in January 2012, I saw it out there on bookstore shelves, but never picked it up. The cover had a foot in a gorgeous red shoe, but the leg looked cyborg:

 And cyborgs aren’t my thing. Or so I thought. 

I didn’t pick up the book until almost two years later. I’d entered Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars contest and one of my mentors suggested reading The Lunar Chronicles because the books (sort of) fit the genre of the manuscript I’d submitted. The mentor said she loved CINDER and thought I would, too. And since she was a Pitch Wars mentor (and you always listen to your Pitch Wars mentors because they’ve just been where you are and know how to get where you want to be, that is agented), I stopped by my nearest bookstore and bought a copy of CINDER.

Of course, it was still a couple of months before I read it (because I always have a stack of books to read that’s as tall as me, if not taller). But when I finally did, I loved it. I went out before I’d finished the first to buy the second (SCARLET) and the third (CRESS).

Knowing that my best book friend loves fairy tales, I recommended she read them, too.  She was as enthusiastic about them as I was, as well as just as disappointed to learn that we’d have to wait until early 2015 for the release of WINTER, the fourth book in the series. Then, in the fall of last year, she told me that she’d read WINTER wasn’t going to be released until late 2015. In its place in early 2015, there’d be a companion book called FAIREST. I wasn’t thrilled about the WINTER wait, but I’m all for authors taking all the time they need to finish a book the way they want to, even if that means delaying a book’s release.

Around the beginning of December, Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati announced that Marissa Meyer would be coming to their store for a FAIREST book discussion and signing on Saturday, January 31. Of course I had to go. Because my best book friend and I learned from Joseph-Beth’s Deborah Harkness signing that the earlier you reserve your copy of the book, the closer you are to the beginning of the signing line, we both called to order our copies within a few days.

What we didn’t know then was that Joseph-Beth was putting together gift bags for the first few people who reserved their FAIREST copy. We discovered this when we arrived last Saturday evening and picked up our books. Though my best book friend’s gift bag had different books, her other swag matched mine: 

Free books and a book signing?! We were ecstatic.

We weren’t the only ones. Even though few others got the gift bags, there were hundreds of people there that night, many of them in gowns and costumes, most of them teenagers (and their parents). By the time Marissa Meyer began speaking at seven, my view from almost the back of the store was this:

And her view of us (taken by a Joseph-Beth employee) was this:

But it didn’t matter that there were hundreds of people there. My favorite thing about these signings is listening to the authors talk about their writing, and Marissa Meyer didn’t disappoint. She was very animated, her voice bright.

Turns out, she decided to set The Lunar Chronicles in New Beijing because the earliest version of Cinderella came from China. Even better, she had been to China. But before she’d decided to set the Lunar Chronicles in China, before she’d even decided to write The Lunar Chronicles, she started with a futuristic version of Puss in Boots, which she had entered into a writing contest years ago. Later, when she began writing the series, she said, she was going to have a fifth book in the Lunar Chronicles series that incorporated her Puss in Boots story. Poor Puss in Boots eventually got cut.

After talking about the series, reading from WINTER, and answering questions, Marissa Meyer began signing books. Because my best book friend and I had called early (and because I have a Joseph-Beth card), we were very close to the front of the line. Even so, as we climbed the stairs to where Marissa Meyer was stationed on the second floor, I still had time to dream that someday, maybe, if I’m very lucky, I’ll have a published book and a book signing. Someday, maybe, I’ll have even a tenth the number of people waiting in line for my autograph. But in the meantime, I was more than happy to exchange a quick hello with Marissa Meyer and go home with these: