Well, it has been quite a hectic month here for us at Bookmarks and with the Teen Advisory council, so forgive our slightly wonky schedule. First school started back for the council, and then Festival happened, and for me, I then had the SIBA 2019 Discovery Show to attend!
But right now I'm just going to talk a little bit about festival and the super wonderful thing I got to do. I was able to moderate a panel with some of my favorite authors on it! That is, the Monsters, Magic, and Warrior Woman panel with Cinda Williams Chima, Dhonielle Clayton, Victoria(V.E.) Schwab, and Megan Shepard. Originally Kerri Maniscalco was supposed to attend, too, but she had to pull her tour for health issues, and I wish her well.
I had a month or so of prep beforehand, in which I enlisted the help of some of TAC to write some pretty stellar questions, but, of course, anxiety always manages to slip in a bit since it's a pretty big public speaking event. However, morning of I woke up ready to go, and with the help of Eliza, who is on of our lovely TAC members, things went pretty smoothly. (We won't talk about me not knowing Hanesbrands Theater only has the front entrance it's fine we were early anyways 😂)
The most important things I wanted to talk about were the incredible way in which these warrior women themselves write omen and LGBTQA+ inclusivity! I had the question about women down to the T, but the other question was a bit harder to talk about, and I vomited some words out on the doc we were putting questions on and hoped when the time came they would magic their way into a coherent question for me.
They kind of did, or at least Victoria Schwab was able to take what I was babbling out and absolutely nailed where I wanted to direct the conversation! It made for a really beautiful moment right there in the middle of it all, because for some reason I asked it right in the middle instead of at any other point.
I think one of my favorite questions, however, was just asking them what their favorite tropes to use were!
I wish I had been recording the audio in some way because I'd love to have a transcript of the whole thing for you all, but above all, I just wanted to let you all know, if you haven't read these fine ladies' books, you should absolutely pick them up because wow.
Even before the panel when I was helping some of them sign their stock for Festival day, they were so, so wonderful. They were fun and vivid and so entertaining and spilled a few secrets about upcoming things that I will definitely not spill- my lips are sealed!
If you like them already, well, there are exciting things to come from them all!
And as we learned on the panel, we all need a bit of the Devil and Jamie Fraser in our romances!
Thank you all for reading, and I hope to also have a write up of my SIBA experience for you next week!