Got "Sketched" at NYCTAF!

Last week I participated in the New York City Teen Author Fest.

Together with authors Heather Demetrios, Corey Haydu, Natasha Sinel, and Aaron Starmer, I read for incredibly impressive adult literacy students at the Queens Library.

I attended some pretty amazing panels on fame, adventure, diversity, and feminism in YA lit.

I wrote out a scene from I Remember You as a play, and performed it, as well as scenes from new books by David Levithan, Holly Black, Heather Demetrios, Kevin Emerson, Tanuja Hidier, Kathryn Holmes, and Scott Westerfeld, at a reader's theater at Barnes & Noble Union Square. Check out the illustration by a courtroom sketch artist. Who knew I had the Bell family nose?!

Finally, at the end of the festival, there was a mega-signing at Books of Wonder, where the highlight for me was buying a huge stack of books by some of the authors I'd been lucky enough to meet and being told by the cashier Sam that she was in the middle of reading I Remember You!

It was so, so great to breathe the YA-writing air. To hear how other authors find ideas and make them come to life. Debut author Natasha Shinel described "finding her water cooler" in a blog post on Fall Fifteeners. I couldn't have put it better.