Boston Teen Author Festival Experience!

GUYS! So I went to the Boston Teen Author Festival this past Saturday, and basically it was one of the best days ever so I just want to share a bit about it.

First of all, two of my best friends came along with me, who are awesome and indulge me in all of my bookish whimsies and for that I am very grateful. We also made a new friend, a girl who had shown up by herself and stopped to ask us if she was in the right place, and we asked her to join us because book festivals are much more fun with people than alone. I gave her the name of my blog so if she’s reading this, hi Kelsey!! I should have taken a photo of the four of us but I was On a Mission to see all the authors and I didn’t think of it.

Anyway the festival started off with a panel of ALL THE AUTHORS.

On Writing

Last year, a friend of mine asked me if I could write a story for her daughter for Christmas. I said sure! I’d love to! I’m a writer, and I especially love writing for people.

I should have known it would become more than “a story.” Anything that ever seems short in my head never quite turns out to be that way. Now it’s almost a year later, and I’m still not finished with this “easy project.”

Before you ask- don’t worry, I’ve been giving it to the girl, Julia, in installments, and to be honest, the fact that I’m doing it for her has been my one lasting motivator for this story. I’ve wanted to give up on it. I’ve written other things in between that have become much more enticing and fun to explore. I’ve considered trashing it all and restarting it a million times over.

The thing is, this particular story has been in my head for years. I’ve restarted it over and over and over. I’ve experimented and changed the plot and the characters and setting. I’ve written thousands and thousands and thousands of words and yet it never feels quite write. I’ve never finished a complete draft.

Reader Confessions Tag

I’ve been reading through some book tags and thought they looked fun! Kinda just nominated myself to do this… 😀

Have you ever damaged a book?

I’m a little paranoid about trying to keep my books as pristine as I can while I read them…but it’s hard not to. I drop them. They get bent in my bag. Humidity rumples the pages. Once, my brother accidentally kicked wet sand into my book while we were at the beach. I wet them with my tears. I try to convince myself I like a warn out, well read book, but I have a thing for brand new, crisp and shiny, hot-off-the-press books, and every time I so much as slightly bend a page it pains my heart just a little.

Have you ever damaged a borrowed book?

Remember, Young Lady

When I studied abroad in the English city of Leeds I was assigned to live in a flat that was as far as could be from my university, and, of course, this seemed the worst thing that could possibly happen.

I would have to figure out how to travel to school in a foreign city. The prospect of traversing along stranger sidewalks was daunting- the most I’d ever had to figure out was the campus layout of my home university, UMass Amherst. And while UMass was big enough on it’s own, I’d always lived right on campus, no messy buses or streets to figure out.

I sucked it up, of course, moved into that flat, and learned the English bus system. The differences from US buses were minor, yet more than enough to make me look like a dumb foreigner if I didn’t have the help of my British flatmate at first.  I went and got a bus pass along with my fellow American flatmate and slowly, after several rides, and one or two particularly troublesome journeys on very snowy nights that turned every landmark identical and unidentifiable, I slowly learned how to do the whole English bus thing.

(T)hello there

Okay. Hello. So listen. I’m really bad at introductions so I’m going to tell you about the time I took a fourteen hour overnight train ride from Paris to Venice.

Or maybe it thirteen hours. Sixteen? Do I truly care to remember? The only thing I recall having to do with numbers was that the train ride cost 55 euros (I think? I might be completely wrong?)(OKAY, maybe I don’t remember anything having to do with numbers about this trip) for the each of us. Each us being myself, Jen, and Sarah, two of my best friends I’d met in during college. This was our Grand European Adventure, a trip that had been in the works since about two years before, when Sarah had begun thinking of applying to grad schools in the UK. While Sarah had shipped herself off to Scotland to study at the University of Edinburgh the summer after we graduated UMass Amherst, Jen and I worked our tiny hearts out to save up money to get ourselves over to Europe. While Sarah, of course, worked her tiny heart out studying (and believe me, that girl studies hard, I witnessed her slave over her dissertation on trains and planes and hostel beds in every city we visited. That thing probably got a free ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower with us).

Anyway, it was the three of us, the Greenough Girls against Europe (Greenough being the dorm the three of us lived in together during our senior year at UMass), and truly, it was us against Europe. Or, perhaps more accurately, Europe against us.