Philadelphia

Two pictures from Sunday's reading at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore (I wish that store had been there when I was a kid - it is right next door to the food co-op where we always shopped - it would have been a heavenly thing to my childhood self!):


In the first picture, my lovely sister-in-law; in the second, the bonus book is
Justine Larbalestier's excellent How to Ditch Your Fairy! Justine's reading there this week also - have a nice time in Philadelphia, Justine!

I was just there for twenty-four hours, but the main thing we did was utterly gorge ourselves on delicious food, on Saturday night at the Spring Mill Cafe in Conshohocken and on Sunday morning at Jake's Restaurant in Manayunk. Before getting on the train to Philadelphia, I did a twelve-mile run on Saturday morning in Central Park as part of my marathon training - I needed a lot of fuel, but it is not of course strictly speaking necessary to have home-made pate (three kinds!), filet mignon, tarte tatin and walnut french toast as fuel!

[ED. Postscript: I forgot to say before, but one of the members of the audience was my former third-grade teacher, the one who prompted me to write this essay about reading.)

Philadelphia reading

Just a reminder that I'll be reading from The Explosionist at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore this Sunday at 12:30 as part of the Mt. Airy Village Fair.

Spooky?

The Explosionist gets a nice mention at the Tyra Show website.

Twittery

At the HarperTeen Myspace page: the one use I might have for Twitter...

(Bonus link: this is slightly along the lines of a story I wrote a couple years ago about what it would be like to be able to get any book you ever wanted, even if it had never been written, from Amazon...)

Podcast!

A long interview about The Explosionist for the Bat Segundo show.

Books of Wonder reading

1. The store had me sign a ton of books, it was good for my authorly morale...

(2. But contrary to popular belief, I learned the other day that it is a myth that signed copies cannot be returned to the publisher! Here, if you are curious, is a recent story on why 'returns' are bad for authors and publishers...)

(3. I have confidence, though, that the delightful staff members at Books of Wonder will thoroughly and wholeheartedly vend these copies...)

4. This is a nice dress that I am wearing, but it shows too much cleavage! I got it a couple years ago at J. Crew, I hate shopping but I spotted it immediately as something I would wear, and indeed I often get a nice compliment on how it looks on me & the question of whether it is vintage emerges (but in fact I do not have a small enough ribcage to wear real vintage dresses from the 1940s!); however it has a fatal design flaw, as all items from J. Crew do (it always is the sort of thing one only realizes once one has actually brought it home), the front flap situation would really have been better off with some kind of button or fastener - it is possible to use a brooch, for instance, to clip it together very high up next to the throat (this is perhaps the modest but alluring look that one might prefer on a date with a vampire!)...





We were egged on to pose by the camera-holder, but I think I naturally have a fairly exaggerated manner in public...





More au naturel:





The main subject of the photograph below is Linda Gerber, who is very nice indeed and whose own camera batteries had run out! Hmmm, I have been a lifelong anti-photographer, really I would always rather live in the moment, but I can see the utility - I took a few other pics for authors who had forgotten to bring their cameras...

Reading on Wednesday 8/6

I'm doing a group reading and signing, with a number of other young-adult authors, at Books of Wonder on 18th St. in Manhattan: Wednesday 6-7:30. Stop by and say hello!