Pitch Dark Days Fall 2013: Denver Recap and Giveaway

Last week I was fortunate to attend the Pitch Dark, Dark Days Tour stop in Denver at the Tattered Cover! It was a fantastic event, and I loved having the opportunity to meet Rae Carson (THE BITTER KINGDOM), Michelle Gagnon (DON’T LOOK NOW), Mindy McGinnis (NOT A DROP TO DRINK), Madeleine Roux (ASYLUM), and Sherry Thomas (THE BURNING SKY). They were all very open and friendly!

The night started by the Tattered Cover making me feel special by showing me to a seat that was reserved just for me.  Here are some pictures from the night:

 

I set up my phone to audio record the event, however, somehow I screwed it up, or it magically disappeared. So sadly, my recap is based off my intermittent notes and memory so some of this is paraphrased… The Q & A started with introductions, and each author telling us a little bit about their book:

Thomas: My book, THE BURNING SKY, is about cross dressing, magic, playing cricket, and fighting a dark lord.

Roux: My book is about a smart young man that goes to take a summer course. The students find out that they’re in a renovated asylum where creepy things happen.

McGinnis: My debut novel is NOT A DROP TO DRINK. It’s about a future America where drinkable water is rare and very valuable. It’s about a girl that has grown up protecting their family’s water. She’s grown up very feral, and now she needs to learn how to live.

Gagnon: DON’T LOOK NOW is the second book in my PERSEFoNE series. The series is about a 16 year old girl that’s a hacker and was able to set up her own life in order to fool the system (and not be in foster homes). One day she wakes up on an operating table… and she ends up teaming up with a boy to figure out what’s going on.

Carson: I wrote the FIRE AND THORNS series because I felt like fantasy fiction was falling flat. I wanted to take “the chosen one” and give it a twist. It’s like Games of Thrones for teens, except my heroine is like Ugly Betty.

All of them were really excited about all the books on the panel, and highly recommended them all!

Q: Where do you get the ideas for your books from? Also, did you just start writing, or did you plan it out?

Thomas: I was writing books for adults, and happily so until my agent emailed me and asked if I’d like to write for the YA market. I said I’d think about it. Months when by and I didn’t think about it until I received another email… but I didn’t know what to do. Then when I was walking across the Costco parking lot… “on the night I was born stars fell” came to me. I went home and researched meteor storms and the last big one was in November of 1986 [not sure if that’s the right year…]. I liked the modern feel of the Harry Potter books, and have a magical world that is set in our own world. The idea came from that one sentence. I just started writing, and then restarted.

Roux: All my good ideas come while I’m driving or in the shower. My characters are each close to my heart and a fracture of myself. College is where I found my people, and I wanted to capture the excitement of finally finding your tribe. With regard to writing: Sometimes I outline and sometimes I don’t, even if I outline something always seems to shit.

McGinnis: My idea came from learning about underwater reservoirs (watching Blue Gold), and how they are depleting and what are we going to do about it? They don’t know so we ignore it. We have to do something about this! No one cared. I have a pond in my back yard but I’ve never killed anyone, to be clear. I dreamed about a girl that had to defend her pond. I had a line, and I new it was a good hook. I don’t have a scientific method to writing. I just sit down and write. I usually have a first line, and this case a last line. It’s organic.

Carson: The trick is deciding which ideas are worth a year or more of our time. I was looking for a way to mess with genre tropes. I was in a piercing parlor getting my navel piered and she through navel blade… With writing, I’m like Mindy, I’m pretty linear. I get really bored if I know my story in detail. I have to let myself discover it as I go. There’s no wrong way to write a book, just write and finish it as you can.

Gagnon: I get my ideas from nap dreams. I had a thought that when Noah woke up her feet were cold. I’m a linear writer.

Q: What character from a book/movie would you want to be?

Carson: Hermione Granger

McGinnis: [I missed her answer, doh!]

Thomas: Princess Leia

Roux: Aria from Game of Thrones [LOVE this answer!]

Gagnon: Jack Reacher

One of my favorite things to ask authors now is…

Q: What is the most embarrassing thing you’ve looked up in the name of research – or what do you think you’ve been flagged by the government for researching? 

McGinnis: Dirty bombs, and researching lobotomies, water born diseases, and all kinds of things that are nasty and gross.

Carson: Bombs that can be made from what you have in your kitchen.

Roux: How to do an ice pick lobotomy. There were some messed up experiments after WWII, and I had to delve into some serious conspiracy theory topics. One was about breast implants and what they would look like when they rupture…

Thomas: I did have to find stuff that I could use. In British schools, like in Eaton School in THE BURNING SKY, the younger boys are like slaves to the older ones, they really do that. And get this, slaving for the older boy is called fagging, the slave boy called a fag. I didn’t use the terminology. 

It was such a great time, I wish you all could have been there. If you haven’t been able to see these lovely authors on tour, don’t worry… because Pitch Dark Books is letting me give away a set of their books! Enter the Rafflecopter below for a chance to win, and don’t forget to follow the tour on Twitter via #PitchDarkDays!

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