TGIF June 22nd! Authors are our Celebrities!

TGIF is a weekly meme hosted by Ginger at GReads. Every Friday she posts a new question and it’s a really fun way to discover new blogs.

This weeks question is: Authors Are Our Celebrities: Have you ever contacted an author you admired? How did that experience go? If not, which author would you love to have a chat with?

This is one of the reasons I absolutely love Twitter, it makes it so easy for me to try and reach out to authors I like! And, thankfully, most of them are so sweet about it. I know they must get bombarded with dozens of @ replies every hour, yet most of them really do take the time to answer back as many as they can. I’ve chatted back and forth with Robin McKinley, Beth Revis, Diana Peterfreund, Victoria Schwab, Sherry Soul and many others. They’ve all been perfectly lovely and sweet and willing to indulge my bombardment of tweets about how amazing their books are.

(Warning, this is apparently Star Wars weekend on my blog, which makes sense since it’s my birthday weekend!)

However, my favorite author experience was a few years back when I first met Timothy Zahn at DragonCon. I happened upon him in one of the dealer rooms, where he was signing at one of the bookseller booths. I did a double take because I wasn’t expecting to meet anyone in the dealer room of all places. So there I was, standing awkwardly off to the side and basically just staring, because y’all this was TIMOTHY ZAHN and he is the best Star Wars EU author ever. And he created Mara Jade, my favorite female character of all time.

There was no line so I stopped staring and stepped up to the table to as very nicely if he’d sign my badge ( I didn’t happen to have any of his books on me at the time). Since there was no one else waiting in line, I asked him a few questions about his books and his characters, ones I had been dying to know the answers to for quite some time. Before I knew it he asked me if I wanted to sit with him and his wife. We spent about half an hour discussing books, characterization, Harry Potter and the benefits of killing off characters.

At that point his time in the booth was up and he and his wife were off to dinner. I thanked them profusely for letting me chat with them and he told me where to find him the next day to get my books signed. And then I wandered away in a complete daze, completely amazed at how I’d just had an entire conversation with one of my idols.

It was pretty much one of the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me.