Tuesday, June 7: Chicago

I slept well, knowing that I would receive a wakeup call at 8am the next morning, and awoke to…darkness. My brain, still running on French time, had decided to give me a 5am wakeup call. I spent the next hour answering emails, and at 6a.m. ordered breakfast from room service.

Crack-of-dawn hotel room breakfast

Ate it. Answered more emails. Looked at my clock. 7a.m. My nervous energy was reaching blow-a-fuse level by this point, so I pulled on my workout gear, went down to the hotel gym, and climbed a huge, 1-hour-high virtual mountain on the video screen of the elliptical trainer, which is pretty much unprecedented for unathletic me. But every time I thought about a group of people staring at me, I got a new burst of nervous energy, and climbed a few hundred feet more.

Because here’s a secret. I have major stage-fright. As a manager at Sotheby’s, I got woozy giving team meetings for fifteen people. As organizer of my Brooklyn neighborhood’s political Meetup, my voice would shake just reading the meeting agenda. My first week as tour guide at a medieval chateau in France, I thought my head was going to explode each time I faced a new group and said, “Welcome to Langeais Castle.” And yes – I taught English at French universities for three years. But I had a stomachache every single day as I stepped into the classroom to face my 40-odd students.

So the thought of getting up in front of people who had read my book…some of whom had traveled long distances just to see me and the other authors…FREAKED ME OUT.

I wore myself out as much as possible on the mountain climbing, and then went back to my room and began getting ready. At 11:15am I made my way to the hotel lobby. The first person I saw was Ellen Schreiber, who I immediately recognized from the author photos on her VAMPIRE KISSES books. She wore a purple top, blue jeans, and a ton of cool vampire-themed jewelry, and stood there coolly waiting as if she had done this hundreds of times. Which, I realized, she probably had, having been a published author for over a decade.

Tara was already there, the smile on her face as big as Oklahoma: it was HEREAFTER’s release date. Her book birthday! And we got to spend it with her.

Veronica Roth walked up and everyone introduced themselves. She had come the shortest distance, since she lives in a Chicago suburb, so she looked fresh and ready for the day. Aprilynne soon joined us, and we were all led by our media escort, Bill Young, to a big van waiting outside.

We drove a short way to our first stop: the Chicago Public Library, Rudy Lozano Branch, where we were scheduled to meet with a high school group. Aprilynne and I made a quick visit to the restroom, where I joined her at the mirror and tried to ignore her as she did something weird to her neck.

At first I thought she was attaching some kind of asthma patch or another medical thingamajig, and averted my eyes. I later saw that it was a fake tattoo in the form of a necklace (the one that Tamani gives Laurel), and she probably just thought I was a total weirdo for not saying, “Hey whatcha doing?” instead of running off to give her privacy.

The night before, Aprilynne had offered to organize everyone, and I was more than happy to obey her instructions on where to sit and what to do. She arranged the microphones so that everyone could reach one, and told the librarian-in-charge exactly what we’d be doing, down to the minute.

From right, Tara, Veronica, Ellen & Aprilynne pre-library talk

As the group from Juarez, Benito Community Academy High School filed in, we took our places behind the table. And for the next hour the students asked us questions and sat quietly and politely, listening to our answers. I almost fainted, but not from nerves. I just couldn’t believe that a group of teenagers could be that well-behaved, after suffering three years of university students who talked, played cards, and made out during my classes. I wanted to get up and hug each and every one of them. But instead, I followed the others to sit behind another table and sign books for the students. I didn’t quite understand the rules, but it seemed like each of them got a free book, and those who had a special sticker under their chair got first pick.

High school group at the Chicago Public Library

After that, Bill asked us if we wanted to go hang out somewhere or return to the hotel for a couple of hours. It being 106 degrees outside (as measured by the car thermometer), we all opted for the hotel and headed to the restaurant for a late lunch.

Conversation was still at the getting-to-know-each other level: cautious but convivial, putting feelers out to see who these people—who we knew mainly through their books, websites and Tweets—truly were in real life. I was starting to suspect that everyone was actually as fun and cool as they seemed on the internet. And it didn’t take long to discover that my instincts had been correct. [Day 2 to be continued…]

Monday, June 6: Chicago

Recuperated from my France-to-Chicago flight at the beach with my best friend Kim and her family. At the end of the day, the taxi I ordered to take me to the Dark Days Tour hotel couldn’t find me because apparently Lake Michigan is not a valid address. Listened to very amusing conversation between Kim and taxi booker that went like this:

“We’re on Isabella and Lake Michigan. What do you mean Lake Michigan isn’t in your GPS? It’s the huge body of water right next to the city! It’s the biggest monument in Chicago!!! How can your driver not find Lake Michigan?”

Me & Kim at this completely mysterious unknown-to-taxis place called Lake Michigan.

Once the driver found me—a half hour later—we sat in rush-hour traffic for another half-hour, and I got to the hotel with fifteen minutes to wash the sand out of my hair and get dressed for dinner. When faced with this type of situation, some people stay cool and collected and go about their business in a reasonable manner. I, however, am not “some people” and instead opted for tearing every item of clothing out of my suitcase and strewing it across the room in my attempt to find something to wear, speed-showering, and getting down to the lobby 10 minutes late with wet hair.

And there, waiting for me all curled up in a chair, typing into her cell phone and looking like nothing in the world could phase her, was Aprilynne Pike. Tara Hudson met us a few minutes later, and we proceeded into the hotel’s restaurant—Aprilynne’s pick since she had been there the year before.

Meeting the other authors felt like the first day of school. And having Aprilynne invite me to a pre-tour dinner was like having the head cheerleader ask me to sit at her table in the lunchroom. I kept looking around, waiting for someone to come up and tell me I needed to move to the geek table. But instead, Aprilynne did everything she could to make me and Tara, the two newbies, feel comfortable.

She answered all of my questions on, “So what exactly are we supposed to be doing on tour?” which then morphed into general questions about Writing and the Writing Life. And I kept waiting for her to roll her eyes at the inane questions or say, “Really, that’s enough of an interrogation for one night,” but she never did. Not only was she indefatigably gracious, but seemed to enjoy being the Bestower of Knowledge, telling us that another veteran writer had filled that role for her a couple of years before.

Tara was exactly how I thought she’d be. Smiley. Down-to-earth. Super-friendly in that gracious southern way that I know so well from growing up in Alabama. And let me tell you, she and Aprilynne had some great stories to tell. Storytellers are my favorite kind of people, so I felt totally spoiled kicking off the tour in their company.

Finally, after three hours of chatting, the pure adrenaline I had been running on began to dwindle. Although it was only 10pm in Chicago, it was 5am in France, and I was starting to nod off. We left the restaurant for our rooms, and with an equal mix of nerves and fatigue, I fell asleep.

[Unfortunately there are no photos from the 1st night dinner, since I was still trying not to be a complete geek. Luckily, I gave up the next day and embraced my camera nerdhood. As you will see in tomorrow’s post!]

T Minus 2 weeks: go shopping with friend, Cassi, who is a style editor living in Paris. Purchase clothes that I would never have dared buy by myself. Thank the fashion gods I have a friend like her, otherwise I probably would have chosen something like this:

T Minus 6 days: Send final manuscript of UNTIL I DIE to my editor at HarperCollins. Do happy dance. Begin packing in earnest.

T Minus 5 days: Send children off to beach with grandparents. Everyone looks happy because they’re still too young to know what 2 weeks really means.

Still T minus 5 days: dog-sitters (a.k.a. friends Laila and Terry, with dog-daughter Freya) arrive to dogsit for Ella. Drive to Tours. Hop on plane to Marseille. (South of France.)

T minus 4 days: Attend friend’s pre-wedding dinner in Grasse (in the south of France).

Laurent at breakfast in our Grasse B&B

T minus 3 days: Attend friend’s actual wedding, during which we all sang a Beatles medley with the bride and groom. Here’s a video:

Love 1

T minus 2 days: Leave hotel for airport: America, here I come!

Did a flight change in London Heathrow, where I found this:

DIE FOR ME & STARCROSSED at W.H. Smith's, Heathrow

And arrived in Chicago, where I went directly to my best friend Kim’s house. Kim is a chef. Her brownies were one of Oprah’s Favorite Things. So, of course, I arrived to a huge spread of food, including fried green tomatoes and 2 sorts of Mexican salads. So tired I couldn’t even stay up to chat.

T minus 1 day: woke up to this breakfast, with my adorable goddaughter, Tizzy

and then, feeling extremely motivated, went to a dance class with Kim and then to the beach:

where, for fear of becoming lobster-red for the following day’s Dark Days signing, I hid under an umbrella most of the time. Caught a taxi to my hotel and then…

IT BEGAN…

T minus 1 day, 7:12p.m. (I was 12 minutes late) I met Aprilynne Pike and Tara Hudson for dinner. And we talked for 3 hours, until I suddenly announced that I was about to keel over from jetlagged fatigue.

Which leaves us at T minus 12 hours or so, at which point Aprilynne, Tara, Ellen Schreiber, Veronica Roth & I will descend upon the Chicago Public Library at exactly 1p.m. and the DARK DAYS OF SUMMER WILL OFFICIALLY BEGIN!

As part of the DIE FOR ME blog tour, Kristin from Bookworming in the 21st Century asked me to write a guest post about creating mythology. Here it is!

I don’t know if I’m the best person to ask about creating mythology, because I didn’t do it in a very organized way.

With my revenants, I started with the idea of an undead being that died over and over again, coming back to life at his original death age. In my mind, a revenant was something between a god and a zombie. And after that I just had to ask myself all of the why, how and when questions and kind of wait for the rationale to come to me.

Little by little, as I wrote, clear rules started to crawl out of the primal sludge. And as each rule emerged, it gradually clarified what the revenants were in my mind. For example, at some point, I thought, “Well, if there are good revenants, there have to be evil ones too.” And then I had to decide what they were and how they functioned.

It all came down to two things, I guess: equilibrium and truth.

In DIE FOR ME, when explaining the difference between the revenants and their enemies, Ambrose tells Kate, “The universe likes an equilibrium.” Mythology also likes an equilibrium: between humans and immortals. Between good and evil. Between fate and chance. If a mythology is too lop-sided it doesn’t seem real to me. So if you follow the equilibrium rule and write half of your mythology, by the default of equilibrium you’ve got the other half practically figured out for you.

And truth. No matter how wacko or out-of-this world a mythology is on the surface, if you read it and it sounds true, than the myth-maker has done her job. Every time I wrote a supernatural passage, I asked myself if it sounded true. And if it didn’t, I worked on it until it did. Or scrapped it altogether.

I think truth comes from a story’s connection with the real world and with other stories. If you can find links with history or with quirky but true aspects of the real world, you will have a firmer, more honest foundation to build from.

Beyond that is the scary (for me) step of making an actual hard-and-fast decision for your mythology that has nothing to do with equilibrium OR truth. Because sometimes you just have to decide that something is the way it is because YOU SAY SO. (I sound like my mom.)

For example, I got to this point in the book where I realized that I had to make my revenants impervious to bullets. The whole mythology needed it, even though there was no rational reason for it. So I just came out and said it in my text.

“ We use guns when we’ re expected to,” answered Charlotte, “ if we’ re fighting alongside humans in the cases I mentioned . . . bodyguarding and the like. But bullets don’ t kill revenants.”

My editor came back and said, “Why? I don’t get why bullets don’t kill revenants.”

So I put on my walking shoes and walked about five miles going over and over in my mind why revenants couldn’t be killed by bullets. And the only thing I came up with was “because my mythology needs it to be like that.”

At that moment I had this kind of revelation. I thought of all of the writers before me who had created the rules for vampires, werewolves, zombies and the like, and they ALL used the no-bullets rule. (Unless it was a special kind of hard- to-get bullet.) But I realized that they all must have gotten to the point as well where they said, “It just has to be this way or my story won’t work.” Which was kind of cool.

I went back to my desk and added on to Charlotte’s sentence:

“ But bullets don’ t kill revenants” —she paused—“ or others like us.”

And with those last four words I linked my revenants to already-established monsters, making my decision legitimate by historical usage.

Mythmaking is hard-going. It makes you kind of obsessed, because even on your off-time, your brain is trying to figure out how things work. But when it all comes together, man does it feel great.

When Brent from Naughty Book Kitties asked me to guest post about French boys, this is what I had to say:

Oh man. Where do I start?

Okay, first of all, it would be easy to throw a lot of stereotypes out there. But if I did the reverse—explained American boys to the French by talking about “jocks” or “nerds” or those Williamsburg hipster types with beards, glasses and tight jeans—that wouldn’t even start to cover half of the American guys I know. So…I decided to give you some stories instead.

French Boy Story #1
I was living in Paris, and had just broken up with a British guy I was seeing. I met this French guy named Sebastien—a friend of a friend—who was an artist. He was tall and lanky with disheveled dark hair…totally my type. He would drive me around Paris on his old dilapidated Vespa to art exhibitions, or to a pile of old stones that he had read were part of a Roman wall, or to an out-of-the-way park for a picnic. I liked him, but wasn’t ready to jump into another relationship after English Guy.

Soon afterward, another French guy named Laurent—who I had had a crush on for about two years, while we were both dating other people—began asking me out. He dropped by my apartment one afternoon, and saw the flowers and bottle of wine that Sebastien had brought the night before when he had come over for a movie. Laurent asked who they were from, and I told him, “a friend,” using the masculine word “un ami.”

The next night Laurent showed up with a much bigger bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne. And as we left my house to go for a walk down by the river, he took my hand and held it firmly—a little bit possessively. I had kind of been avoiding that because, again…I wasn’t sure if I was ready to date someone again, but he reached down and appropriated my hand. That’s the best word for it.

He never asked me any questions about Sebastien. The topic of the “other guy” was never broached. But he silently decided to try to beat his competitor.

French Boy Quality #1: an understated, quiet confidence that I find totally sexy.
(Oh, and…by the way…I married Laurent a couple years later.)

French Boy Story #2
One of my husband’s friends from childhood had a pretty rough life. To say he’s been a bit messed up for a long time would be putting it lightly. My husband hadn’t seen him for years. But when he passed through our region a few weeks ago, he asked if he could come spend the night. I was scrambling to finish a manuscript, but threw together a decent dinner, fixed up a bedroom, and welcomed him as best as I could while juggling kids, dinner and work.

I knew he had been an addict, and had briefly met him over a decade ago, but didn’t know what to expect when he arrived. He was emaciated. He seemed sad. But he was polite, helped with everything he could see to help with, played with the kids, and went outside to smoke without me asking him to. When he went into town the next day to “do some shopping” he asked if I needed any groceries. And when he came back, it was with a gorgeous bouquet of flowers.

A day later, I got a thank you note from him in a beautifully-written French (my translation’s not going to do it justice): “A quick weekend in Touraine (our region) with just the basics: friends, a sumptuous home, and a few glasses of wine. I couldn’t have asked for more. Lolo & Amy, congratulations on your exemplary achievements. Thank you and bravo.”

French Boy Quality #2: gallantry and poetry when you’d least expect it.

French Boy Story #3
I’m standing in the train station at the Paris airport wrangling my kids and luggage as we wait for the train to take us home after an exhausting trip to New York. I notice a man taking photos in my direction and figure he must be a railroad enthusiast or something. Until I notice him moving to the other side of me and shooting from another angle.

I wave over my husband, who’s off studying train times, and tell him I think the guy is taking pictures of me. Laurent takes a good look at me and his eyebrows shoot up. “Your dress is totally see-through in this light,” he says. “What? It’s black! I looked in the mirror, it’s fine!” “Not here in this light, it’s not,” he replies. So we move the kids and luggage and I sit down with my back to pervie camera guy.

Ten minutes later, the guy has come around and is standing in front of me, a ways away, taking photos of me again. And at the same moment I notice him, I see my husband walk up to him and they start to talk.

I don’t like tough macho guys. I especially don’t like guys that get in fights. My husband has never been in a fight in his life, and as I watched him, I was kind of surprised that he had confronted the guy. They exchanged words in a polite manner, and then the man turned and walked away, not to be seen again. As Laurent sat down next to me, I asked him what he had said. “I told him that if he took another picture of my wife I would break his camera and then break his face,” Laurent said calmly.

“What!?” I gasped.

Laurent did that cool French-guy shrug and said, “C’est normal.” (e.g. “What else would I do?”)

French Boy Quality #3: born into a culture that’s been around for thousands of years, they’ve got the whole “this is how things work” figured out.

French Boy Story #4
One of my father-in-law’s best friends is this guy named Claude, who has these enormous white moustaches that curve up on the sides. He’s old-school French, complains about the government no matter who’s in power, has all of these conspiracy theories about banks and the minorities living in France, and is mildly but annoyingly sexist in that “they’re another generation and just don’t get it” kind of way.

YET…when I was pregnant he brought over tons of clippings from his lilac trees because he knew how much I loved the smell. We had a long conversation about using apple seeds to firm up fruit jam (this was during my thinking-I-actually-fit-in-in-the-countryside phase), after which he brought me sample jars of several different types he had made that year. And he joins my father-in-law in clipping sour cherries from my FIL’s tree with scissors, gathering them in cute little baskets, and making this kick-ass moonshine-style cherry liquor from them.

French Boy Quality #4: there is a completely different view of what is masculine and feminine, and even the old guys can be seen as embracing their femininity. (Just don’t tell them that.)