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About a month ago, an old friend mentioned to me that one of my favourite authors, Maureen Johnson, was going to be in Houston on September 28th-29th for a book tour, and asked if I wanted to go. Now, since moving overseas from London, I reside in Louisiana, which is admittedly NOT THAT FAR OF A DRIVE from Houston. Furthermore, I had taken a particular liking to this author a couple of years ago while working a boring job (on the plus side, from a certain point of view, I was being paid $10 an hour to read her books, and nothing can beat that).
Maureen is a fantastic YA author with strong characters, charming atmospheres, firm premises and great use of language. While she's a pretty fantastic wordsmith wizard, a lot of her allure is that she possesses pretty wild tendencies outside of her books. In fact, it's not too out of the ordinary to say that she is mildly insane. Anyone who knows me well knows that I too am "mildly insane," so naturally, we'd get along. Allow me to bring to the jury, Evidence A, the video she made to promote her latest book Name of the Star:
Pretty much how I felt when I approached her with the fanfiction.
Naturally I said "Maureen Johnson? Next month? This will happen. This MUST happen." We made tentative plans and I decided I was going to fandangle my school and work around it, like some massive black hole in the future. I worked hard and saved up to afford the brief financial hit, and then something dawned on me with three weeks to go. I had something to bring her.
The Project Begins
About the time that I began paying attention to her, I realized three things: (a) she has a wild love affair with her dedicated fanbase, (b) she updates her twitter like crazy with a ton of fun and interesting things, (c) she is pretty open about her life on her blog, and (d) she loves fanfiction. The culmination of all three of these things is that she put out a request to her fanbase for someone to write fanfiction of her life. Being a writer, and with enough unbiased people telling me that I'm damn good at it, I took up the call.
I started writing for NaNoWriMo (National November Writing Month) back in, oh, 2009. My subject was her. I spent some time going across her blog and her twitter, working from right before her birth to present date. I wrote the entirety of her childhood out (with massive fictitious liberties, as I couldn't find much on it), and did my best to write something she'd love to read. At about 21,000 words, something came up and I stopped.
Cue three weeks ago.
I realized that I still had this writing project somewhere, and I hadn't heard anything about fanfiction of her popping up. I checked online. I looked around and didn't see much of anything. Thus, I dove through an old hard drive, found the document, read through it and realized that half of it was salvageable. So, I chopped half of it out and started mostly fresh. I did not realize that this project would drive me into madness.
I spent every free moment I had rooting through her blog, seeking personal information to form a backbone to my story. I was low on time, had a ton of schoolwork and regularwork to run through, and didn't see a lot of anybody. I had a deadline that I hadn't anticipated and it hovered in front of me like a savage creature, clicking its mandibles and salivating all over the good china.
And it worked.
Wrapping It Up
After pulling one all-nighter and logging 6,000 words in the middle and towards the end, I had finished this great and daring fictional biography that I set out to write two years ago. I logged 50 pages and 27,920 words in total, and all of it fictitiously about her life. Not only that, but I had finished the very first writing project I had ever started--a monumental feat for me, as I've run through so many projects and abandoned ideas. Sure, there were parts I was still itching to reword, or things I wanted to add, or a mistake here and there that I thought "Bugger! Why didn't I see that?!" Overall, though, it was a success, and I was finally done.
Only, the hard part was bringing it to her.
I was nervous. Here she was, this wonderful woman, and I had no idea how she would take it. I had a pretty good idea, mind you, that she would be impressed. She might even flip through a third of it. Maureen Johnson would take it warmly, read parts, and it would wind up in the bottom of her stack of things to do. This is what I thought as I frantically scrambled for an hour to find somewhere to print it out. (Ed's note: Printing stuff in Houston is EXPENSIVE, especially when you can't get a library card because you live out of state!) After spending a full day in Houston prior to her signing at Murder By The Book, I was starting to lose steam. It began to nag at my brain. My confidence remained intact, but the slow, building madness clawed. I did a great job, I kept telling myself. Even if she doesn't like it, I did it. I finished it. A full story. Done. Over. I breathed an easy sigh in a McDonald's, my travelling companion watching me try and hold myself together. But what if she doesn't like it?
The Gifting
And after a day at the Houston Zoo and various fun activities, I finally met her. She did a fantastic Q&A that I didn't think to record until the last moment, and we stood up by pre-assigned numbers to talk with her for a moment while she signed our books. I thought a million times in my head in that ten minutes what I was going to say, the folder held nervously to my side. Nobody had said anything about it, which reassured me. I waited and chatted to keep my mind off of things, but then it was my turn and she made eye contact with a smile.
Now, I am a pretty confident fellow. I don't unnerve easily, and while I've learned a great amount of humility in my life, I've also learned that I am awesome. I say this to tell you that I wasn't all that afraid, or even scared. I was in the presence of somebody even more awesome than myself. My mind blanked and we made a brief bit of small talk as I repeatedly almost forgot that I was holding the culmination of all my adoration for this woman.
I briefly explained the "You asked for fanfiction" thing, and then placed it in front of her.
I did not expect what happened next.
I do not want to imply that Maureen lost her composure in a fit of adoration. I don't want to make it sound like she lit up like Disneyworld fireworks, or that she immediately scrambled to flip through the pages and kept pointing out random things and saying "This is all true! All of it!" I don't want to say that I felt my unease warm into a flickering blaze of pride when she looked back up at me with author-fan love in her eyes.
Wait a minute. Yes I do. Because that all totally happened and I almost died from sheer joy.
I hastily informed her of a little of the backstory behind my work, that I had ruthlessly researched what I could find about her (although I ran out of time and couldn't read EVERY blog post she's ever written), and she asked for me to tweet her a link online (and she tweeted my work to her 40,000+ followers). I pointed out that I had left contact information, should she be impressed with my work, and tried to pull the generic "I know you're a busy woman and probably won't read all of--" before raves of Yes, yes, I'm going to read it all, are you mad?
It was one of the best nights of my life, that great and beautiful moment.
Conclusion
This has been an awfully long and subjective post, but there IS a point to all of it: this all started from Charles telling me that Maureen was going to be in Houston in September. Without that conversation, none of that would have happened. But it did, and it sent a cascading set of events into motion. I'm not so bold as to think that anything more might come of it all: but even if this particular story stops here, there are two great things in my life that changed on Thursday, September 29th, 2011.
1) My great writing heroine, a woman I deeply admire, knows who I am.
2) This woman is impressed with me.
In a perfect world, we'd become close friends. Hey, I've got some time ahead of me yet, a manuscript I'm working on, and a list of agents I want to approach. Maybe not so far-fetched in the future. There's one particularly Unfeasible individual whom I have designated my dream agent, and although I have a list of agents to approach, something tells me that I want to dedicate my attention on that one.
But none of that last part is important right now.
What IS important is the awe/admiration I felt in that moment that this author I love noticed me.
And also, that I use this momentum for constructive purposes, to further my work.
I've finished a writing project and I have renewed motivation.
I will be a successful, published YA author yet.
P.S. Haven't really read her books, as I'm not of the chick-lit persuasion, but her YA comrade Stephanie Perkins seems really cool too. She is another whom I want to meet.
You can read the fictional biography here: https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B86yFp8WzUxyYTRkMmI4NWYtNTU0Ni00ZjBiLWI3MzgtN2Q2OTE4OTQ1MWIy&hl=en_US
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