This Is My Secret: The Blog and Website of Writer Kristin Cashore

One of the secret delights of being the author of three standalone fantasy novels that differ in their protagonist, their emotional tenor, and their pacing is that a lot of readers will tell me which one they prefer. And (astonishingly), readers' preferences seem to be pretty evenly divided among the three books. It makes me SO happy that each of my books is finding its right readers. But it also teaches me something about how writing relates to reading – something about how little control I have over my readers' experience of reading. Every time a book is read by someone new, it becomes a different and unique book. One of the awesome things about being an author is watching my books become things I never expected or intended! That's the power of a book. Books are more powerful than writers or readers. Maybe books are as powerful as writers and readers combined?

I bring this up because Jane, Unlimited is a book that contains five different stories in five different genres…

All of my events will involve an "in conversation" with a local author or book person, a Q&A, and a signing – and possibly also a brief reading, though we haven't worked out the details yet. I'll be blogging again with more details as we sort it out! I hope I'll get to see a lot of you out there. Here's a bit more info, with more to come soon:

Tuesday, September 19th at 7 PM -- with Tui Sutherland!
Harvard Book Store
1256 Mass Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138

Wednesday, September 20th  at 6 PM
Oblong Books & Music
6422 Montgomery Street
Rhinebeck, NY 12572

Friday, September 22nd  at 6:30 PM
Parnassus Books
3900 Hillsboro Pike, Ste 14
Nashville, TN 37215

Saturday, September 23rd at 4 PM 
Barnes & Noble
12193 Fair Lakes Promenade Drive
Fairfax, VA 22033

Sunday, September 24th at 2 PM
Quail Ridge Books & Music 
4209-100 Lassiter Mill Road
Raleigh, NC 27609 

Monday, September 25th at 6 PM  -- with Stephanie Perkins!
Malaprop’s Bookstore
55 Haywood S…

One night in Copenhagen, I was waiting for the hotel elevator, when two Danish men about my age stepped out of their room. One of them belched loudly as he stepped into the corridor -- then saw me, and was embarrassed. They both started chuckling, and speaking to me, both at once, in Danish.

"I'm sorry," I said in English, "I don't speak --." Then I stopped, because I couldn't remember what country I was in or which language it was that I couldn't speak this time. This happens when you keep crossing borders; a few hours ago, I'd been in Sweden; the next day, I was going to be in Spain.

"Oh, you don't speak that language?" one of them said, speaking English now. "It was a Danish word for --" and he went on to explain to me how his friend hadn't actually belched, he'd been saying something very intelligent in Danish. :)

The next day, when I told my cab driver in Madrid the address of my hotel, he began speaking to …

Here's a video link to the Q&A portion of my event at Casa del Libro on Madrid's Gran Via, September 11. It's about 14 minutes long; my editor, Patricia Escalona, serves as interpreter. It might be a little bit tricky for non-Spanish speakers to follow, because the English versions of the questions didn't always make it into the microphone. Though my answers did. The first audience question was, "Why do you write about girls?" ... I wonder, why is it that writing about boys requires no justification, yet I am repeatedly asked why I write about girls?

And here's an audio link to an interview with L'autre Monde in Paris, conducted by Xavier Desnos, who asked some nice, in-depth questions about Bitterblue. My wonderful interpreter was Adèle Ecochard. About 9:30 minutes.  And Some photos and other stuff are here.

Many thanks to everyone involved :)

That insubstantial, hook-shaped landmass I can see from my airplane window is unmistakably Cape Cod.



I am home :)

Hi everyone, if you want to watch my book event this evening at Casa del Libro Gran Via at 19.30 (7:30 PM), it will be streaming live. Everything will be spoken in both English and Spanish. Go to @rocajoven on Twitter for more information: https://twitter.com/RocaJoven. Or my own Twitter, @kristincashore. (Sorry, I can't really deal with links right now!) I expect I'll be talking about the writing process, maybe reading two or three pages from Bitterblue, and answering questions from the audience. FYI to my American readers: Madrid is six hours ahead of New York.

Charlie Stross on a book tour reality TV idea.

Though just to be clear, my European tour is NOT like what he describes. See my earlier post about the difference between a domestic and an international tour for an American author, at least in my experience. The two are very different; he is describing what sounds to me like a domestic tour in the USA, a signing tour. (I understand Charlie Stross is English and lives in Scotland, so I'm not actually sure what type of tour he's talking about, or if his experiences line up with mine location-wise. Am I confusing everyone?)

Also -- just in case I created the impression with yesterday's posts that we're not doing any work here in Spain -- yesterday was unusual. We had a light day, then some cancellations. Today we're making up for it!

Thanks, JD, for the link :)

This fall (starting next week! ACK!! Where is Bunter to pack for me!), I'm doing public events in Stockholm, Kristianstad, Madrid, and Paris. (I'll also be in Amsterdam, but I don't believe I'll have any public events there -- I'll come back and let you know if I do.)

I'll also be in Arlington, VA for NAIBA, in Austin for the Texas Book Festival, and at NCTE-ALAN in Vegas, yes, NCTE-ALAN is in VEGAS this year.

Dates and details:

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
Thursday, 6 September, 17.00
I'll be signing at SF-Bokhandeln.
Address: Västerlånggatan 48.
http://www.sfbok.se

KRISTIANSTAD, SWEDEN
Saturday, 8 September, 11.00
I'll be a guest at the Bokfestival in Kristianstad and will be talking about fantasy-writing, answering questions from the audience, maybe doing a short reading from Bitterblue if there is time...
http://www.kristianstad.se/bokfestivalen

MADRID, SPAIN
Tuesday, 11 September, 19.30
Along with my editor at Roca, Patricia Escalona, I'll be meeting readers at …

Re: Bitterblue travel: I'll be in Sweden (Stockholm and Kristianstad/Malmö), Spain (at least Madrid, not sure beyond that yet), France (Paris), and the Netherlands (at least Amsterdam) in September -- it's official, my transatlantic flights are booked -- and I'll post more details when I have them.

Re: blogginess: There are a few updates I need to post to this blog, including some sort of page of Bitterblue reviews... I'm afraid some aspects of the blog have dropped to a currently unreachable part of my priority list, so things aren't as tidy around here as I prefer them. I will get to it some day. In the meantime, what blogging time I have, I'm trying to focus on new posts. I have a couple planned. One is about Tim Riggins. :-)

Re: gorgeous clouds, check out this stupendous link to "60 insane cloud formations from around the world." Thanks B, via B! :)

And re: awesome music videos, I love this ASL interpretation of Gotye's "Somebody That I U…

A couple books I recently loved:

Mystery of the Tempest: A Fisher Key Adventure, by Sam Cameron, which is kind of a brilliant, modern-day Hardy Boys-esque adventure in which the young detectives are identical twins, one straight, one gay. It's awesome to read adventurous hijinks in a familiar form (of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew ilk), but with diversity, on several axes. Book two, The Secret of Othello, comes out in November.

And: What I Didn't See, stories by Karen Joy Fowler, is spectacular. Some realism, some fantasy, some Shakespearean and fairy tale themes, some historical fiction, especially about the Booth family (of first theatrical, then assassination-of-Abraham-Lincoln fame). My favorite stories in the collection: "Booth's Ghost" and "Halfway People." I understand that the paperback is coming out this summer.

For those interested, the New York Times has changed its mind and decided my books are a series after all, so if you're looking for my …

I want to share some of the awesomeness of independent bookstores with y'all. These pictures are inadequate at expressing the full experience of my tour, because they only show two of the bookstores I visited -- but they'll give you an idea.

The first is Children's Book World in Haverford, Pennsylvania. This was just the best event ever. The booksellers at Children's Book World went all out. Also, I have family and friends in the Haverford area who were able to come. Thank you, Children's Book World, for throwing a FABULOUS party, and also for giving me the venue to perform in front of loved ones, including my parents.







The second is Wild Rumpus, in Minneapolis. I had a school event with Wild Rumpus, then had the opportunity to visit the store afterwards. If you're ever in Minneapolis, you need to check out this store.







Guys? Only independent bookstores can be this awesome.

***

Now that rant I promised. Here goes. I know there are a lot of people who love to read…

Before I get to the questions, I love Justine Larbalestier's recent blog post, written to her friends and extended family: "You don't have to read my books." Now seems like an appropriate time for me to link to it, since I have a new book that's just come out. Friends and family who might be feeling obligated? YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ MY BOOKS! Read Justine's post -- she explains lots of great reasons why.

Now, SPOILER WARNING: These questions/answers don't contain any significant Bitterblue spoilers, but the first two questions definitely contain significant Graceling spoilers.

1. In your acknowledgments for Bitterblue, you included an interesting mention having to do with Po, disability politics, "magical cures," and your own failings as a writer. Would you talk a little bit more about what that was all about?

Here is the section of my Bitterblue acknowledgments to which this question refers:
Thanks to Rebecca Rabinowitz and Deborah Kaplan, wh…

How appropriate that on the last day of my book tour for Bitterblue, the drive to the airport should bring me over one of the world's most beautiful bridges, the Golden Gate. Bitterblue is out in the world. Fly, my little bird. I'm on my way home.

… when you find yourself fascinated by random shapes in your hotel room. Lamps. Mirrors. The corner.


My editor encouraged me to take lots of pictures while I'm on tour, and post them on my blog. This may not be what she meant. Oh well. She knows I'm a little bit weird :-)

The tour is going really well. I don't say this enough: I've got the most wonderful readers. The people at my events in Cambridge, Rhinebeck, Villanova, Haverford, Bethesda, Naperville, and now here in the Minneapolis area have been so generous to me, and the questions have been SO SMART. I'm trying to keep track of some of my favorite questions, and I'll blog them, with answers, at some point.

At events, I'm too hectic to be taking pictures, plus, while on the road, I'm blogging from my phone, so I'm limited when it comes to what pictures I can easily blog/label/format. So I don't have event pictures to share (though I do have a few I'm working on setting up, and hope to …

Driving around Washington DC is different from driving anywhere else. Today, on the way to the airport, we were driving past one beautiful, stately building after another before it occurred to me to pay attention to the signs outside the buildings. The Embassy of Bolivia, the Embassy of Brazil… well, no wonder. We drove along the Potomac and saw one monument after another, Jefferson, Lincoln, Washington, some of them close up, some in the distance. I could see the dome of the Capitol building, far away, and also Robert E Lee's mansion.

Suddenly, sharp memories of the first trip I ever took to Washington DC began to overwhelm me. I came with my mother. It may have been the first time I ever stayed in a hotel. It was a trip I won, by spelling; I was 12 years old, and I'd come to Washington to compete in the National Spelling Bee.

The next year, when I came to compete in the bee for the second time, my entire family came along. I didn't do particularly well in the bee (eithe…

A note to my readers in the Chicago area that the event at Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville is at 2 PM on Saturday, May 5, not 7 PM as I said previously. Sorry for the error!

Saturday, May 5, 2pm Anderson’s Bookshop 123 West Jefferson Naperville, IL 60540

Also, come back here on Sunday (and beyond) to read Secret Council Letters from the Spring of Bitterblue's Eighteenth Year.

Serbian cover of Graceling, published by Carobna knjiga. I didn't even know this book was out until Carobna knjiga's Fire landed in my mailbox. Click to enbiggen, this is a cool one! I love the blood in the font. ----->

For those who've been wondering, my ankle is feeling better every day. I'll just be careful to leave extra time for getting places on the tour, and I'll resist the urge to rush to catch planes. I intend to set new records for packing light. Inspired by Laurie Halse-Anderson, I'll take a picture of my tiny luggage and post it here if I get the chance. Of course, Laurie was packing for a five-week tour. Mine is only a week and a half (because I am a WIMP). So make sure you're duly impressed by Laurie's feats of packing!

For anyone who wants to know a little more about what my events will be like: I'll start by reading from Bitterblue for maybe 10-15 minutes; then I'll talk for a few more minutes about the process of writing the …

I signed lots of books for lots of people in a very short time on Thursday, and a number of souls, probably noticing the mania in my eyes, kindly expressed concern for my health. On the off chance that any of those same people later saw me being wheeled through the Houston airport, please allow me to reassure you that I did not fall into a faint from too much signing or anything like that. No, what I did was, I stepped creatively off of a curb. In the horrible moment after it happened, a moment during which I replayed the dreadful snapping noise over and over in my mind and discovered that I truly could not stand, I feared that I'd broken my ankle (which it turns out I hadn't), and all I could think was that my book tour started in 12 days. My book tour started in 12 days, and I had to go and miss the curb and do something SO FREAKING STUPID. It's not like I was rushing headlong down a hill while attached to a spastic dog. It's not like I was jumping off a boat onto a …