Friday I went down to One More Page (apparently narrowly missing the Orange Line hubbub) for the romance panel. Zoey Castile, Adriana Herrera, and Alexis Daria were there. Zoey asked questions primarily of Adriana, since her book (now out today) is the newest one, although the second in Zoey's series had just come out that week. Adriana felt strongly that working in Manhattan she saw Dominican and Afro-Dominican people every day, and wanted to see them represented in books. She also said sometimes when you read a book set somewhere in the middle of the country and they will have one Latinx character and she would read and think, hang on, tell me that one's story, how did they get there. Zoey (who also writes as Zoraida Cordova) has a story set in Montana, and she said she picked Montana because she had been there. And she had gone there herself because it was somewhere that seemed far away from her family. That was also how she found romance, because she had been reading a lot of literary stuff, but searched out books about Montana and found Nora Roberts' Montana Sky.
Alexis loves paranormal and sci-fi and space stuff - she'd love to write a Star Trek, btw world - but hadn't found a lot of traction with that, so ended up combining some of her other loves and trying contemporary dance reality series. She also said that because she'd given the hero in book 1 all these brothers, some folks had expected her to do more stories about the brothers. (Sidebar here, it's funny to me that this had not occurred to me until she said this, even though I know brothers are often sequel bait. It probably helps that I was attracted to the dance reality show folks, and it made sense to me that the series would follow the reality show folks.)
It was a really fun night, and there was wine, which didn't hurt.
Sunday I was back out there - just regular weekend single tracking this time - for Lenore Appelhans chat about her forthcoming book, Manic Pixie Dream Boy. Lenore has lived in the area a bit, so there were quite a few writers in the audience. They did mad libs, and acted out a group therapy scene from the book. This book started as a project while Lenore was doing an MFA at VCFA, and part of what they wanted her to do was write something a little different than her normal, so she was trying not to kill people this time. She said it mostly worked. The book sounds like ti works nicely on a number of levels, so it will be fun even if you haven't read all the YA's or seen all the tropes. But she did say there were things she had planned at the start that others reading it were like, yeah, I didn't buy that, so she had to figure out how to make those changes.
So much fun, and now I have to figure out when I will read all these books.
