Jonny Sun was at Politics and Prose Saturday night, and I was pretty excited. I am a fan of the Twitter account, and had been meaning to pick up the book, but it had been out of stock the few times I had looked, and so, I figured this was a great chance. Plus, he was chatting with NPR's Linda Holmes, which is always good stuff.
They talked about while Sun had done things like theater and comedy in school, those were extracurriculars, while he studied engineering and later architecture. So Twitter ended up being a great medium, he could do it while walking between classes, on quick breaks, or what have you. Sun chose an alien avatar kind of without thinking. Holmes asked if the positivity of the account was an intentional choice. Sun said yes, he wanted to talk about things like anxiety and imposter syndrome, but also wanted to have a thing that was cute but serious. That things that are adorable can be equally as important.
He talked about the drawing process and that the minimalism was something he worked on and that when the book offer came, a lot of what they worked on in editing was having the story build well and still arc, while he kept the differing storylines overlapping so that it was kind of like logging into twitter on any given day and getting snippets.
A child came up and asked about the mispellings, and Sun said that it tied into the idea that as a Canadian in a new city in the US for school, he felt that things were different and he was trying to learn and that's why he had used the alien idea, and that part of that he felt was the idea that an actual alien would make spelling errors.
It was a great evening and pretty fun to go to an event where so many people had clearly not only read, but reread the book.
