So--40 Teen Authors Walk Into A Bookstore...

Yesterday, as the culmination of the 1st Annual NYC Teen Author Week, there was a massive book signing/be-in at Books of Wonder in Chelsea. Here's a great class picture of most of us that organizer and teen author guru David Levithan took after it was all over. And in true class picture fashion, due to my height I'm in the center of the back row (just behind Coe Booth).

About 40 authors total were on hand to sign books and mingle with their readers and it was a bit of a mob scene. But, given the state of publishing these days, that was a very good thing. There were so many of us that they had us signing in three different shifts. I was on the last one, being an S. In addition to signing copies of PROM MESS and TALE OF TWO SUMMERS, I also signed three pairs of jeans as well as a dictionary in which I had to circle my favorite word ("donut"--shocker, I know). The owner of the dictionary, a blogger by the name of Hayley Anne Perkins, was then going to turn all 40 words the author's picked into a poem...you can see the results of her literary stunt here. Quite impressive....

Anyway, I had a blast chatting with avid readers, enthusiastic librarians and lots of authors, some who I knew (like Coe) and some who I'd recently met. One of the latter was Maryrose Wood (front row, far right), author of the recently published book MY LIFE: THE MUSICAL, about Broadway-obsessed teens living in Long Island. As we were discussing musicals, I told her how a production of Stephen Sondheim's MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG was featured in TALE to which she replied; "Oh--I was in that show." And she didn't mean at the community center playhouse. Maryrose, as it turns out, was in the original Broadway cast back in 1980! So her book now goes to the top of my YA reading list. And, if you like musicals, you just might get a kick out of it too.