It was great to be at the teen writers conference in Ogden, Utah on Saturday June 6. I got to hang out with some great authors I admire and meet some new people about my age who also like writing.
In the top picture, I'm with some writer friends Kim Wayman, Kimi Poulson, and Holly Bishop. In the next photo, I'm signing books. I got to answer some questions on the panel, (in the next picture), although I'll admit that the one about what college degree I got before being published had me stumped. I could only answer that I graduated at the top of my kindergarten class.
For the "What ideas do you start with?" question, I was in favor of asking yourself "What if?" questions, such as, "What if instead of nice town names like "Mt. Pleasant," "Fountain Green," and "Fairview," there was a place named "Crappy Average Town?" What kind of people would live there? What kind of jobs would they do?
Unknown to me, one of the girls in the audience was from Mt. Pleasant, and said so after I spoke!
The worst part of the whole conference was at the end when my little brother sat in the aisle to take pictures of me and ended up picking a scab off his leg. Ew! You can see my annoying little brother in the second to last picture, where he's standing by me. We're both in back of author Jessica Day George. All the rest of it was pretty good. I'm glad I could go, as you can see from my smile in the last picture where I'm standing with some other great authors, Lisa Mangum, J. Scott Savage, and James Dashner. I'm their hero.
