I love authors

Laura Ruby comes next week as part of our Fantasy Fall. She’s the author of a middle grade fantasy series including The Wall and The Wing and The Chaos King.  She also writes young adult contemporary novels like Bad Apple and Good Girls.

I first met Laura over a year ago when I attended the Highlights Foundation Whole Fantasy Novel Workshop. Highlight’s whole novel workshops are a week long program, where you get to submit a novel you’ve written for critique and then spend a week in Pennsylvania, with instructors and other students, making your novel better. Laura was my instructor, and in one week I learned more about writing from Laura than I’d learned in my whole life.  I’m not quite as old as dirt, but still – my whole life has been a pretty long time!

On first meeting, Laura’s intimidating. She has long wavy red hair. She’s smart, articulate, and funny.  When she talks every part of her body gets into the story. Her hair moves, her face twists into new shapes, her hands fly about. I was scared of her – and I wanted to be her.  I’ve been an irritated, frustrated, occasionally angry, and annoyed person most of my life – but Laura makes irritation and annoyance look entertaining. She can do angry and make it funny, which is a real art form.

Whenever Laura tells a story – which is often – about something that annoyed her, she does this thing. She holds her right hand like she’s gripping a knife and then she pounds it into her left palm, likes she’s stabbing something; the whole time saying “stabby, stabby, stabby.” This is actually one of the best things I learned from Laura. Now whenever I feel “stabby, stabby, stabby,” I think of Laura and I can usually laugh, rather than actually stabbing things!

Laura will be giving a talk here on Oct. 17^th at 7:00 pm, entitled Magic, Myth, and Monsters: Why not to be Scared when Kids want to Read Scary Stuff. Whether or not you like fantasy or horror, odds are you know someone who does. So come find out what the fascination is and why what scares us might not be so bad.  I don’t think Laura will actually scare you – but maybe you’ll get to hear “stabby, stabby, stabby.”