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Posts Tagged ‘reading’

What Makes Author Events So Appealing?

Thursday, October 6th, 2022

Dear Readers,

One of my favorite pastimes is to attend author events. I have gone to more events this year than ever before. The last time I attended a bookish event was when I attended the Boston Book Festival back in 2019. It was the first time I ever covered an event for my university’s newspaper and my first experience with journalism. 

When COVID hit, bookstores had to figure something out. If these events could not continue in-person, what were the alternatives? I am sure that many of the questions asked were in line with how to bring together many people in one setting in order to hear an author speak. Then, online events came in full swing. It allowed for people with busy schedules or long commute times to be able to see an author from the comfort of wherever they were. 

At the beginning of 2022, author events began to return to in-person, with an added bonus of hybrid events. Being able to meet authors face-to-face again and hear them discuss their works that they have spent time on, often in the hopes of giving an audience something to love or learn from, is utterly inspiring to me. 

It has made me wonder what makes author events so appealing? On the one hand, author events are like celebrity meet-and-greets for readers. If one loves an author’s book, one may hope that they can meet the author in-person and pick their brains. On the other hand, readers just love to hear about books, but this is a step above a simple recommendation.

Another thing that I personally love about author discussions is that they are super inspiring and motivating. I never leave an author event without immediately yearning for my laptop to continue writing my own manuscript. 

For introverts, author events can either be a completely solo experience or it can be a great opportunity to make bookish friends that may be hard to come by in a different environment. 

For go-getters, these events are great ways to branch out and connect with people in various industries related to books. Sometimes author’s friends, publicists, editors, and/or agents tag along. If you can find a way to put yourself out there, author events are a great avenue for your career. 

I love the excitement that author discussions bring. It feels so amazing to know that an author is just a regular person who found the time to put their imagination on a page and sought out the right people in order to give people a story to love. Since the majority of events I go to feature Young Adult writers, it reminds me that no matter how old I get, I was a teenager once who fell in love with reading, and I want nothing more than to share that same feeling with teens in the future. 

What do you love about author events?

Sincerely,

Kaliisha of Woods BEAUyond

RANDOM THINGS OR SMALL TOWNS & SECRETS

Tuesday, August 14th, 2018

I’m excited to be on the blog today, talking a little about myself. My name is Sarah Guillory, and I wrote Reclaimed, a book about small towns and secrets.

 

Random Things about Me:

  1. I’m a runner. I run six days a week, and I’ve run nine marathons (I do a marathon every other year, as it’s a pretty big time commitment and I need lower-mileage years for both my brain and my body to just love running, without any goals to chase down). And I love running. Like writing, some people say they enjoy having written or having run rather than the actually process, but when I’m running, I enjoy the movement, slipping undetected through that pre-dawn stillness, racing my past self, letting my mind and body wander. Jenna, my main character in Reclaimed, also loves running, but she wasn’t always a runner, and she isn’t a runner because I am. It took me a while to discover that Jenna loves running (at least two false starts and one early draft), and she loves it because it’s her way to escape, the forward momentum that she hopes will take her out of her small town and away from her alcoholic mother. I run less as an escape and more as an act of living in the present, of loving where I live (I’m from a small town and live in a small town and just in general really love small towns), and, as I age, even as an act of defiance.
  2. I’m a dog lover. Ridiculously so. I currently have two dogs, a bloodhound who is a year and a half and a six-month-old lab mix my husband rescued from the woods when he was a sick and starving weeks-old puppy. I wasn’t always a dog lover. I’ve enjoyed dogs in the past, but it wasn’t until my first bloodhound that I fell in love, and now I’m kind of stupid about it. But they make me happy (most days, though the lab mix is loving getting up at 2:30 AM right now) and keep me sane and humble and are quite nice writing companions. It’s weird that Reclaimed didn’t have a dog in it, but my last two manuscripts do. And the dog will always live.
  3. I’m a teacher. And I love it. There are very few professions where you can talk books all day, and I’m lucky enough to find one. I’m even luckier that I get paid to try and make readers out of other people. And that’s sort of my mission. I hope that each year every single one of my students encounters a book that turns them onto reading. If it’s not one I’ve assigned, I hope it’s one I’ve recommended or mentioned or have on my shelf in the back of my room. I believe that reading makes us better people, provides a better-quality life, shows us who we are as well as places we’ve never seen and people we will never be. It challenges us and reveals us, entertains us and sustains us, and I became a teacher because I wanted to pass my passion for books onto others. I’m not always successful, but I am always unabashedly enthusiastic. And if the words I write can do for other readers what stories have done in my life, then all the better.

 

Thanks for reading! You can always find me online at www.sarahguillory.com or on Twitter and Instagram @sguillory262.

Random Things or “Love”ing-ly Ever After?

Wednesday, May 16th, 2018

I never know when I’m going to fall in love. Especially when it comes to falling in love with new experiences, hobbies, or things. It always starts off innocently enough—there’s a little bit of curiosity, an itch to try something new. Most of the time, that’s where it stays—maybe I’ll take a class or check out a book from the library on “hobby du jour.” But when I fall for something, I fall hard, and I go from curious to “welcome to a new hobby/sport/language obsession” in a heartbeat. Like romantic love, it’s random, unexpected, wonderful, and brings out the best parts of me.

For this “random things you might not know about me” post, I’ve decided to list random things in my life that I love*. Because what we love, after all, helps to define a big part of who we are:

  1. I love being a Mechanical Engineer. I love how I was trained to be a problem solver, whether I’m developing medical devices or plotting out manuscripts. I get to use art, physics, and math to make really cool things to improve people’s health and quality of life, and it’s an epic feeling seeing something I made in action, whether in a surgery, recovery, or a post-op x-ray.
  2. I love languages. I’m multilingual—bilingual in English and Portuguese and conversational in French and Spanish. I love how language is culture and history all wrapped in the evolution of words and phrases. Writers are word alchemists—we turn words into bookish gold, and it’s fun to have a playground full of possibilities pouring out of multiple dictionaries.
  3. I love to dance. Ballet and contemporary were an important part of my life until I ruptured my Achilles tendon. I started figure skating as a sort of physical therapy and fell in love with it, too. Skating went from therapy to a new way to spin, dance, and fly (and I get to pick my skating outfits, which beats recital dress roulette by a mile).
  4. Phoebe’s love of archery in Bookishly Ever After was based on teen me’s dream of becoming Susan Pevenzie from the Narnia books. When I started researching archery for Bookishly, I ended up falling in love with the sport and have now been taking lessons in Olympic recurve archery since 2014. I love digging my feet into the grass of the outdoor archery range and I love the feeling when I clump my arrows together so closely, I can hear one arrow skim the others on its way into the target.
  5. I love to draw. When I was in high school, I had thought of becoming an English or Art teacher, but when I decided to study engineering, I had falsely believed I had given up all chances of ever doing anything with art or writing. I was certainly wrong with the writing, but I think drawing will remain something just for me and just for fun, like skating and dance and archery.
  6. I loved fencing, and fenced foil and epee on my college’s men’s team (we didn’t have enough women to form our own team). It made me feel strong and graceful, and I still feel a little thrill when I see my old gear.
  7. And, lucky 7, I love to write, but you’ve probably figured that out already.

What about you? What are the things that sneakily found their ways into your heart? What are the random things you love?

*Blogger’s Note: Omitted are the living beings I love: family, friends, cats… you get the idea, because this post would get way too long. WAAAAY too long. Ditto bigger things, like the world, snow, glitter, and old records playing on hot summer evenings… and… and…