YA Extravaganza Book Signing

(In order from left to right:  Diana (met her at the event), Gayle Forman,
Stephanie Perkins, Nina LaCour, Jess Rothenberg, and then me!)

So this post is a bit delayed, but I didn't want to wait too long until it became irrelevant (especially because I have two swag packs to give away -- details for that will be down below).

This semester I was studying out in San Francisco, and my last week there I found out about this event -- the YA Extravaganza in this great store in Menlo Park called Kepler's Books.  Basically the place is made of awesome.

Anyway, this event was pretty amazing -- there were four authors (Gayle Forman, Stephanie Perkins, Nina LaCour, and Jess Rothenberg), and then Heidi Kling (another YA author) moderated the event. (Jandy Nelson was also in the crowd, so that was great -- six YA authors in one room?  It's like a dream come true.)  Another fun fact -- three out of the four of their books either take place in San Francisco, or they have something of SF included in some way.

The event started out with each author reading a "sexy, swoony, or sweet" scene from their novel, which was a lot of fun.  I've only read Stephanie's Anna and the French Kiss... so the scene she read was great, and the scenes from Gayle's Where She Went, Nina's The Disenchantments and Jess's The Catastrophic History of You and Me just made me want to read them even more.

Following the reading was a question/answer session with a lightning  round at the end.  There were some really great questions asked, followed by some really interesting, sometimes quirky, answers.  For instance when asked if they had any quirky reading habits Stephanie had a fun answer -- first of all she has to make sure her desk is set up just right, and that all the icons on her computer are organized, however that wasn't the most interesting thing to me.  For each novel she's written she has used a different lotion to sort of put her in the mood to write.  It's a sensory thing -- if you didn't know, smells are one of the strongest memory/emotion triggers (Example: Every trip I go on I use a different shampoo, true fact).  So now knowing this... I plan on being a copy cat.  I'll be picking out a lotion here in the next few days to put on before I write.

And then for some of the lightning round questions they were asked some fun questions.  One was "What book made you want to be a writer?"

• Stephanie:  Looking For Alaska by John Green
• Gayle:  Sisters in Sanity (Her first book -- if you haven't read it, you probably should, I loved it.)
• Nina:  Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
• Jess:  The Witches by Roald Dahl

Another one that I liked was "If you could have written any book, what would it be?"

• Stephanie:  Harry Potter by JK Rowling
• Gayle:  The Dictionary
• Nina:  Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• Jess:  Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Overall this event was pretty amazing, and I really enjoyed myself.  There was a ton of swag available as well, and I was able to snag some to give away here on my blog.  I have two giveaway packs:

   

Each pack has an item from each of the authors -- the only difference is that there's a different poster for The Disenchantments.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I hope everyone had a great Monday!  Stay tuned for future posts -- I'm officially on summer break, so ideally my posts will become more regular.  Hopefully.  Thanks for reading!