sábado, 30 de septiembre de 2017

Event: Marie Lu & Kiersten White Signing in San Diego [Warcross tour]


Hello! It’s been a while since my last post, this due the giveaway I was organizing, I didn’t want that entry to get lost so more people could see it and participate.

Last Saturday, September 23, I attended the last signing of Marie Lu for the Warcross tour, for this one she was going to chat with author Kiersten White. 

Warcross Summary
For the millions who log in every day, Warcross isn’t just a game—it’s a way of life. The obsession started ten years ago and its fan base now spans the globe, some eager to escape from reality and others hoping to make a profit. Struggling to make ends meet, teenage hacker Emika Chen works as a bounty hunter, tracking down players who bet on the game illegally. But the bounty hunting world is a competitive one, and survival has not been easy. Needing to make some quick cash, Emika takes a risk and hacks into the opening game of the international Warcross Championships—only to accidentally glitch herself into the action and become an overnight sensation.

Convinced she’s going to be arrested, Emika is shocked when instead she gets a call from the game’s creator, the elusive young billionaire Hideo Tanaka, with an irresistible offer. He needs a spy on the inside of this year’s tournament in order to uncover a security problem . . . and he wants Emika for the job. With no time to lose, Emika’s whisked off to Tokyo and thrust into a world of fame and fortune that she’s only dreamed of. But soon her investigation uncovers a sinister plot, with major consequences for the entire Warcross empire.


Marie Lu.
I arrived kind of late, the event had just started and I had to pick up the book I had preordered online to get a ticket for the signing line. The whole event was a chat between both authors, which have a super nice chemistry making everything fun and interesting.

Marie Lu talked mainly about her new book, Warcross. She mentioned that she wanted to write something lighter because the books she had been working on were dark (the Young Elites), and so she wrote Warcross for herself. She decided to challenge herself writing a duology instead of a trilogy, that way she could get rid of the middle book that’s always hard to write, but she didn’t think the structure would change that much. She mentioned that writing a duology turned out to be harder because she has to combine two books into one.

Lu also mentioned that right now Emika, Warcross main character, has become her favorite because she put so much of her own personality into Emika, so she identifies with her a lot. And finally she said that she would like to see Warcross adapted as an anime, she is currently watching Sword Art Online, an anime with a similar story about immersion videogames.


Kiersten White
On Kiersten White’s side, she said that of the And I Darken books, she definitely don’t identify with Lada, and she actually dislikes her main characters, she likes the secondary characters because they don’t require as much development and only appear to say something clever and disappear again. She said she identifies with Radu the most.

A topic that took major importance was the novels they are writing about characters they didn’t create. For Marie Lu is Bruce Wayne. DC is making a series of young adult novels of superheroes during their teenage years, being those Wonder Woman Warbringer by Leigh Bardugo (already out), Superman by Matt de la Peña, Cat Woman by Sarah J. Mass, and Batman by Marie Lu. Lu said that writing about a character is not hers is really hard, there are a lot of expectations on her from the batman fans, she loves batman and feels honored to write about Bruce Wayne during his teenage years because there is a big gap between the moment Bruce loses his parents and when he became Batman. She also said that DC wasn’t too specific about restrictions; they just told her that it must be a story set when Bruce was around 18, and that’s it. The book comes out in January 2018.

On Kiersten’s side, she is working on a Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel, and feels a lot of pressure because there are a lot of hardcore fans who grew up with that series, just like her. Right now she is still working on that book, but didn’t specify if it would be a standalone or a series, but
My Warcross Copy
what’s sure is that it will take into account the graphic novels and it will contain a character she created, a new slayer. She mentioned that she would love to write a novel about Jessica Jones and would like to be offered to write about Star Wars, but wouldn’t do it, she just want to be offered to do so.

After this chat it was time for only two questions, I don’t remember the first one, but the second one was about if there is a school to take creative writing classes as a career. Both authors said that even thou there are good schools with creative writing as a career, they recommend to study something different and take writing courses, but writing skill comes with practice.

I had so much fun in the event, it was crowded but still both authors took their time to chat a bit with every reader, I was so happy that Kiersten White remembered me from the Now I Rise launch party and had a pleasant and encouraging chat with her. The next event I plan to attend is a Maggie Stifvater signing.


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