Libba Bray's Blog, page 5

Hey Peeps,

Just a quick update before I put my head down into my book again. This week is NYC Teen Author Festival. It's chock full of awesome YA events. Below is a list of stuff I'm doing this week and below that is the link to the whole shebang. Hope you can make one or two of all of them!


Wednesday, 3/17 - NYPL, South Court, 42nd Street, (the big one with the lions) 6pm
The Treasure Map to Going Bovine with Will Grayson. Speakers - Libba Bray, John Green, David Levithan, E. Lockhart

Readers' ...

March 11th has rolled around again, signaling that it's time for the annual birthday blog.

One of my favorite cheesy things to do on my birthday is read a gazillion of those "You Born Today" thingies. My mom always sends me the one from my hometown newspaper (Thanks, Mom.) I usually pick up the tabloids and see what they say about those of us born on March 11th. (Hey, John Barrowman! I see you, Joel & Benji Madden. What up, Bobby McFerrin? Okay, stop showing off. I know you can make your voic...

I'm racing down the final stretch of the first draft of BEAUTY QUEENS. Well, that's optimistic. I WISH I were racing. More like limping while dragging a large slab of beef wrapped in chains. (Don't ask me where that image came from. I have not, to my knowledge, ever limped down a street dragging a side of chained beef behind me.)

I hate this part. It's relentless. It reminds me of when I used to run cross-country, those practices where you'd be out doing a ten-mile run, and at some point, you...

One of the fun things about writing in a town different from your own is that everything seems new and somewhat miraculous: "Why look! They give you coffee in a blue mug in this café. What wonders will we next behold?" While here, we've written in a lovely bookstore overlooking an energetic stream. We've written at Holly's house. We've plotted and planned in the car and at a hipster vegan-ish café where college students in varying degrees of ironic t-shirts congregate. But the most interestin...

Yesterday, I nearly killed Holly Black's coffee pot.

It began to wheeze and fill up at the top with brown water and refused to drip actual coffee into the carafe. Somehow I had managed to clog it up and my repeated attempts at resuscitating it were unsuccessful. Like "approaching catastrophic" unsuccessful.

I tweeted my distress and Cassie Clare tweeted back (with a certain sense of mirth, I feel), "Better run! Holly loves that coffee pot more than any human." Which was super helpful. Thanks,...

When I was five years old, my mother asked me what I'd like to be when I grew up. "Queen of England," I answered. After all, her name was Elizabeth. My name was Elizabeth. LOVED her wardrobe. She had me at tiara.
"You can't be Queen of England," Mom said. "You have to be born into that."

I was disappointed to say the least.

When I was seven or eight, I announced that I wanted to be a champion figure skater. My mother looked up from her cross-stitch with her patented I Fear There Is Something N...

Yesterday, Maureen Johnson www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com/index1.html tried to kill me.

Here’s how it went down. Yesterday—bad day. I felt generally unwell and Woody Allen-ish, i.e., it was the sort of day in which I did not seem right in my skin and I was certain this was a portent of my impending doom. Some people feel not right and they think, oh, I should get more sleep, or hey, maybe if I eat some protein and drink some water I’ll be right as rain. This goes against my fatalism. No, when I ...

Ack! It's December. Did you know about this? Were you going to tell me? When were you going to tell me? Where have I been? Where am I now? Where do I need to be next? Where are my socks?

I'll tell you where I've been--in the writer's cave, that's where. Down in the Hobbit Hole with my Gollum of a deadline mumbling ever near my ear. In the meantime, I'm trying to post a bit here and there on my Twitter (I'm @libbabray, as opposed to @notlibbabray or @thatidiotlibbabray.) And I'm going to try t...

Several months ago, Maureen Johnson http://www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com/index1.html lost a bet.
She had to face her fear of flying high on a trapeze.
Then she got swine flu and had to cancel.
But yesterday, Maureen met her fear. And her fear looked her in the eye and said, "Sucks to be you today, Maureen Johnson." Then it cracked its knuckles and said, "Boo-ya!" just for a little extra flavor. I love Maureen's fear. It's funny.

Lest you feel any pity for her, please remember that MJ made me do...

I love Junot Diaz.

I'd always loved his short stories and then, I fell in love with his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. (Apparently, I wasn't the only one because it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year.) But I really love him for this essay about how freaking HARD writing can be sometimes.

www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200911-omag-junot-diaz-writing via www.robinwasserman.com/

I am trying to take his words to heart as I struggle through my new WIP which is starting to f...