Upcoming events in Charlotte, NYC and beyond!

Hey y'all!  Just wanted to let you in on a few upcoming events:

Thursday, October 21 at 4:30 PM
Kinston, NC
I'll be speaking at the Kinston-Lenior Public Library.  You can find more information here.

Friday, October 29 at 6:00 PM
New York, NY
The Princeton Club, 15 West 43rd Street
I'll be speaking at the Williams Club and reading from The Dark and Hollow Places (the first sneak peek!) and signing afterward.  T
here should be books for sale after the event!   The event is free but reservations are required -- you can email eventsATprincetonclub.com or call 212.596.1261 to reserve.  See below for more details!

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Saturday, October 30
Charlotte, NC
Charlotte Geeks Gala
I'll be the guest judge for the Geeks Got Talent contest!  There is a cost for admission and all proceeds go to Youth Homes, an organization dedicated to providing supportive human services to children and families.  For more information about the event, click here.  This is going to be a super fun gala and I can't wait to see y'all there!!

To learn more about the Charlotte Geeks, the Gala and to see me on TV, click here!  I have to admit, I was SUPER NERVOUS about the whole experience until I realized that I just had to sit there and the head of the Charlotte Geeks, Joey, was the one to do all the talking.  She did a brilliant job!  Also, she organized to have some zombies, some trekkers, Bat Girl and someone dressed up in an awesome steampunk outfit.  Joey totally outdid herself -- she rocks!

Michael Grant in Charlotte Monday!

I love Michael Grant.  I love his books and I think he's hilarious and thoughtful in person.  I had the great pleasure of speaking on a panel with him last year in NYC and have been hoping that we'd be able to cross paths again.  So you can imagine how excited I am that he'll be in town doing a few school visits and then signing at my local indie!

Here are the details:

When:  Monday, October 12 at 4:00 PM
Where: Park Road Books
What: He's touring for his new MG series The Magnificent 12 which has been getting some truly excellent reviews.  But I hear rumor he'll also be signing his other books as well!

One of the questions we got asked while on the panel in NYC was about the limits of what we can and can't write about as authors (or rather, what limitations we feel put on us by editors, publishing houses, readers, etc).  Michael discussed the interesting intersection between writing violence and the words authors can use to describe that violence and how often that creates a situation where something violent happens and the character's response is "oh darn" rather than an expletive.  His answer has always stuck with me because I think there's a similar intersection between writing about violence and sexual situations -- how much more leeway I feel writers have in writing violent situations than they do writing about sexual situations.

If you're interested, you can actually watch the panel here.  It was a post-apocalyptic teen panel featuring Michael Grant, Scott Westerfeld, James Dasher and me.

Hope to see some of y'all on Monday at the signing!

Novello Festival of Reading in Charlotte October 9th!

This weekend in Charlotte NC is a Tribute to Novello Festival of Reading!  Here's the info on my panel, Saturday October 9th:

1:15 p.m. Young Adult
Carrie Ryan: Dead-Tossed Waves, Forest of Hands & Teeth
Karon Luddy: Spelldown
Joyce Hostetter: Comfort, Blue, Healing Water


I have a very deep love for the Novello Festival.  For those of you who don't live in Charlotte (or for those who do and didn't know about Novello), it's a festival put on by the Charlotte/Mecklenburg library system (PLCMC) that began in 1991 (this would have been the 20th anniversary) and, as its name implies, is a festival that celebrates reading.

I first heard about it in 2007.  The day after I sold my book to Delacorte Press I found out that Libbra Bray, another Delacorte author, would be one of the guests at Novello and that it was happening that weekend -- less than a week after my deal went through.  I couldn't believe my luck!  So my husband and I both went down to hear her speak and nervously, I stood in line to meet her and I introduced myself and told her I'd just sold to the same house she wrote for.

ZvU - even back in 2007!

She leapt up, gave me a hug, signed my book (yay team zombie!) and I walked on air for weeks after.  It's hard to explain how awe-filled that moment was for me -- I'm such a huge fan of Libba's writing and I spent half of the festival staring at her and thinking, "One day, that could be me! I could be on a stage talking about my books!  One day, I'll have a book on the shelves people might ask me to sign."  And of course Libba was so funny and gracious and flat out awesome... she was so welcoming to me as a brand new author.

I always remember that feeling -- how full I was on the absolute joy of that day at Novello.


So I was upset when I learned that, because of budget cuts, Novello had been cut from the PLCMC budget.  I wasn't surprised by the news -- I'd seen the signs, library budgets all over the country are being slashed and all told, a festival can be expensive and perhaps that money could go to keeping a library open one more hour or day a week -- a service desperately needed.

Luckily, there are people in Charlotte who were unwilling to let Novello go.  Who very smartly realized that there's a difference between reviving something that's mostly dead rather than all the way dead.  They decided that when the economy gets better it would be easier to say "hey, can we allocate a little bit more to this existing program?" rather than "hey, can we restart this program that had to be cut?"

A professor with UNC Charlotte, Mark West, and a former librarian and owner of Black Forest Books and Toys, Pat Siegfried, worked tirelessly to put together a Tribute to Novello to keep the tradition going.  Authors chipped in their time and hopefully the Charlotte community will turn out and prove how important it is to keep events like this going.

When all is said and done, I feel so amazingly honored to be part of the Novello tradition.  Three years ago, mere days after signing my first book deal, I dreamed of this moment.  I feel so amazingly lucky that it's coming true.