Author Visits (Rick Riordan and Margaret Peterson Haddix)

In October, when the Son of Neptune came out, I was about an hour away from one of the seven tour stops.  I was, of course, really excited about this and was able to convince my mom to take me.  Rick Riordan arrived on a "chariot" pulled by black horses.  It was supposed to have something to do with Hades.

I had been thinking of a question to ask him for weeks.  I wanted something unique.  We stood in line forever!  I was number 202.  That was apparantly really good; I think there were about 800 of us. 

I got up there and he signed my book.

You can't really see my face or my purple t-shirt, but still an amazing picture!!!  Here's what I asked (not paraphrased at all).

Q: In the Kane Chronicles, when you said that Manhattan had its own problems, did you mean the Greeks and Romans?

A: *nodding his head* Yes, and you'll see what I mean in book three. 

It doesn't sound nearly as exciting when you write it, so picture one of your favorite authors basically telling you, "Wow.  How observant! My third book will be completely amazing, and you know that for a fact before everybody else does."  As you can see, he even signed the person behind me's book while still talking to me! 

Personally, I was so happy about the whole thing that I almost started crying while picking up sauce at the Taco Bell on the way home.  Here's his signiture in case you're curious.  I think I have crazy eyes but I can't help it because I'm not photogentic at all.

***

Now I'm going to talk about Margaret Peterson Haddix.  She came to my school about two weeks ago.  Somehow, I managed to eat lunch with her, along with six other middle schoolers.  That was pretty exciting, too. 

However, this time I had no questions at all.  I made up some on the fly, but they weren't very exciting.  Some of the other kids had some good questions, though, so I'll list some of those, slightly paraphrased.

Q: Who is Jonah?

A:  That's a surprise, but you'll find out in the seventh book (the last one).

Q: What's your favorite book that you wrote?

A: I won't say because that would be like favoring children.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for the Shadow Children sereis?

A: My family was debating about whether or not to have a third child.  We considered over population, and I said that if it was such a problem, there would be a law against third children.  The idea just popped into my head.

Q: How did you get the idea for the Missing series?

A: I got disoriented when I woke up when our plane was landing, and I couldn't remember who I was for a moment.  I started thinking what would happen if a bunch of kids were disoriented in a plane and no one could tell them who they were.  The idea moved on to babies.

Sorry, but those are some of the only ones that I remember enough to write about.  Someone asked how much she wrote a day, and I remember that she answered with an insanely large numbers of hours, but I don't think non-exact answers are really helpful.

For all of you who have no idea what she looks like, here.



I have a picture with her, but I really don't want to look through my email to find it.  I'll try to do another screen shot of her signature; it's a bit neater than Rick Riordan's.

I hope that was at least a  little interesting for you.  It sure took forever to write.  Probably, because I was trying to take the screen shot via skype. 

Hope you all have a very nice weekend.

PS. Mrs. Haddix told us when all of the rest of her book in the Missing series come out.  You can see it in my Coming Soon page.  (There will be seven.)

PPS.  My books aren't actually yellow.  They are all white, put my lighting's awful.