Tip of the Day: My awesome online critique group has a website! Check out a group of talented YA/MG writers at http://www.migwriters.com/.
Last weekend, I attended the annual Rochester Teen Book Festival and saw inspirational author presentations by Sara Zarr, Daphne Grab, Jenny Han, Jack Ferraiolo, Robin Brande, Sharon Flake, and Matt de la Pena. I also got books signed by Kenneth Oppel, David Levithan, and Ellen Hopkins. It was phenomenal. The turnout of teens dying to see their favorite authors was so much fun!
If you'd like to read about the festival and see some great pictures, check out Deena's writeup at http://deenaml.livejournal.com/122006.html, author attendee Jenny Han's blog at http://thelongstockings.blogspot.com/2009/04/tbf-forever.html, and my local librarian's take at http://blaine.org/sevenimpossiblethings/?p=1626.
I left those links as full addresses because I wanted you to see where I'm leading you. But I could've made them into "tinyurls" because I know how to do that. Yeah, I'm on Twitter, although I haven't quite gotten the hang of it. For the Teen Book Festival, I decided to Twitter my experience. I set up my account to take texts from my phone the night before the festival. I was all set to report from the scene.
You know what? It's really hard to say something substantial in 140 characters without practice. I ended up tweeting "Robin Brande is awesome" and "Jack Ferraiolo is soo funny!" And those things are true, but you probably could've figured them out without my Twitter updates.
What I liked better was searching for the Teen Book Festival in Twitter afterwards and finding people to follow. Now that I have some more feeds to read, I can think about how to be clever in 12 words or less. That has to be great discipline for a writer, right?
Before the festival, I received an invite for it in Facebook. After the festival, I read blogs about it by other people who had attended. I enjoyed that. It made the festival more exciting, more of an event. At the festival itself, though, I totally slacked on the picture taking and clever tweeting. I need to live in the moment, I think, so I have trouble preserving it at the same time. I'll try tweeting another event though, and hopefully get better at it with practice.
-- Kate, Miss Perfecting the Pages
That is pretty cool! In one session, Robin Brande was like, "all right, who's twittering about us RIGHT NOW?" and one girl raised her hand. It was too funny!
ReplyDeleteYeah, we needed to agree on a Twitter search term, like #tbflive!
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff. I'm so jealous. I wish I could have gone. Great idea to try to twitter but its tough. I have a cell here in Korea, but I've no idea how to use if to twitter. I can barely read my menu!
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