Oliver, McGinnis, & Warga

About five years ago, I was living in downtown Cincinnati and often walked across the river (via bridge, of course) to the Barnes & Noble at Newport on the Levee. I love that bookstore, mostly because it has two levels full of books and a café that overlooks the river and downtown. I often bought a book just to have an excuse to sit in that café and read. Back then, I was reading mostly literary fiction. But the YA section of books was close to the café and one day, a beautiful book cover caught my eye.

I put back the literary fiction I’d found downstairs and bought Lauren Oliver’s BEFORE I FALL instead. I fell into a YA world…and my reading and writing haven’t been the same since. Even five years and hundreds of books later, BEFORE I FALL is still at the top of my favorite list of books, YA or otherwise. It’s the book that made me realize I’m a YA writer, that I want to write and publish a book that gives others all the feels I had for BEFORE I FALL.

So when I heard that Joseph-Beth was hosting a discussion and signing event with Lauren Oliver on March 16, I told my best book friend that we had to go. As a big bonus, the event included authors Mindy McGinnis (who’d signed my copies of NOT A DROP TO DRINK and IN A HANDFUL OF DUST at Books by the Banks last October) and Jasmine Warga (who I’d just heard about through a Book Riot post about YA and physics).

In an uncomfortable wooden chair, my tote of to-be-signed books resting on the floor between my legs, I sat at Joseph-Beth last night and listened to Oliver, McGinnis, and Warga discuss their books, their writing, their author lives. And I couldn’t help but be a little jealous. Because I’m not just an average reader. The ways they interacted with each other, laughing and talking about other writers, their own themes, their ideas—all of those are things I either understand (what with my own writing life, working a full-time job, querying, getting 1K words written each and every day) or want to understand (going on tour, using social media to connect with fans, fans).

Not that I’m writing here to dwell on all that. The more important part came after, when I briefly chatted with each of the authors.

JASMINE WARGA

As she signed my copy of MY HEART AND OTHER BLACK HOLES, I asked Warga not about the darker elements of her story (which I guess draws the majority of reader questions), but about the physics. Was she, like me, a science nerd? The answer was no, with a laugh. Just out of college, she worked for a teaching program where she had to relearn everything she knew about basic math and science to teach her students. The physics elements of MY HEART AND OTHER BLACK HOLES came from that experience.

MINDY McGINNIS

Because McGinnis had signed my copies of her books months ago and because I’d talked to her about them then, we discussed her newer projects instead. Her next book, A MADNESS SO DISCREET, a gothic thriller in an insane asylum, comes out in October. In 2016 she’ll have a dark contemporary thriller (the name of which she didn’t share, though I was too focused on what she said of the story itself to care). I asked how her agent and editor felt about works so different from her other two books. She said they loved them, that they give her free reign when writing…and tell her to scale it back if necessary. I can’t wait to read both.

LAUREN OLIVER

I had three books for Oliver to sign: PANIC, VANISHING GIRLS, and BEFORE I FALL. I started with how much I love BEFORE I FALL. (If you haven’t read it, then you definitely need to give it a go!) Then, I moved on to the fact that I’d finished VANISHING GIRLS the day before. We couldn’t really talk about that one much, not without possibly giving away the huge twist of a climax to nearby readers who weren’t to that part yet. So I asked instead if that nameless climax had been her plan all along or if she’d realized it somewhere along the way. She said she’d been trying to write this book for years, ever since BEFORE I FALL was published, but hadn’t come up with this climax until the most recent draft attempts. I wanted to say that I have one of those books, lurking and churning in the back of my brain, but there wasn’t time and so many other fans awaited their turn with her.

As my best book friend and I left Joseph-Beth last night, I kept thinking about BEFORE I FALL, about the things Oliver, McGinnis, and Warga said. That book I have lurking and churning? It kept coming back to me on my drive home, urging me to find the missing key to writing it, maybe a huge twist of a climax. Because if the current book I’m querying doesn’t find me an agent, maybe that’ll be the book that will. And then maybe someday I’ll have the opportunity to sit on a panel of authors, telling readers and hopeful writers about my stories, just like Oliver, McGinnis, and Warga.