I was a chaperone for a field trip today as my school sent a group of kids to the Young Authors Conference. I’ve chaperoned this one a number of times over the years, and it’s become a favorite. The first time I went my writing was little more than a hobby, though one that still fired off some occasional “author someday” writing dreams. Mary Granpre, the illustrator of the Harry Potter books, appeared as a keynote speaker. I was a little starstruck to be in the same building as so many real authors. I’d even heard of several of them.
The second year I went felt a little different. I had gone through NaNoWriMo twice by then and had two complete manuscript drafts to my name. Some of the kids who came along that year had even read one of both. I was on pins and needles a bit since one of those manuscripts had earned a full request from an agent during the time window we were there, so everything about my author life speculation was heightened. Nothing came of that request because the manuscript wasn’t ready, the time wasn’t right, and I had yet to cross paths with the right agent.
My third conference happened just a month after the right agent and I found each other. I wandered through the conference that year with dreams that felt slightly more tangible, now seeing all of the authors there as people who could potentially see me as a peer in the not too distant future. I tracked down an author I knew who was presenting, David LaRochelle. He had a lot of history with my school and we had crossed paths over the years because of that, so he knew about my writing and had always been supportive. It felt great to tell him the news of my representation, since he knew exactly how big of a mountain I had climbed to even be able to make that claim. The keynote speaker that year was Geoff Herbach, who had a great speech and put on a great session. I tweeted him afterward to tell him how much I enjoyed his presentation, and later that same day he followed me. A real author, with published books and everything, following me on Twitter! it was so cool.
This year, my fourth trip to the conference, things were quite a bit different. First of all, a little over a week ago my plan was to go to the conference, live up a day with the kids chosen to participate (because they’re writers so of course they’re good and smart and interesting) and then go straight to Barnes and Noble to buy Justin Cronin’s new book The City of Mirrors, which was released today. That plan was torpedoed in the best of all possible ways last week when a box showed up on my front step with an early birthday present from my agent inside — a pre-release copy of The City of Mirrors. I nearly passed out.
I still had the conference to look forward to today, though. I walked around in my Watership Down t-shirt, because what else are you going to wear to a young author’s conference? It was a good conversation starter a few times when people enthusiastically recognized the listed names of “Fiver and Hazel and Blackberry and Bigwig.” (I still think Hazel should’ve been listed first, but, you know, different topic.)
The first session I went to was one of my highlights of the day: Magical Realism presented by Abby Cooper. Her debut middle grade novel Sticks and Stones will be released this coming July. We’ve known each other on Twitter for some time, but like most of the people in the Twitterverse, we had never met in person before. I told her in advance I was chaperoning that day and would be sure to come to her session. Since one of my students had a ticket to see her in the morning, I tagged along. The presentation was great, and her past teaching experience was clearly working for her. I had the chance to talk to her briefly afterward, and it felt great to make a new real-world connection to someone in the writing community. On my way out, I grabbed a couple of the bookmarks she had set out for attendees — one for her upcoming book, and another for My 7th Grade Life in Tights by Brooks Benjamin. Brooks and I both write for the "Middle Grade Minded" blog (check it out here if you want to see how awesome we all are) so I know him though that, and his book is currently perched atop my summer reading pile, just waiting for me to finish reading The City of Mirrors.
I had another session after that, then our group went outside for lunch on a nice patch of the campus grounds with a comfortable sun/shade mix where we were entertained by the same calypso band that has played the conference every year I’ve been there. After lunch we went into a book fair sponsored by The Red Balloon, one of the big-time bookstores in the Cities that specializes in books for children. I browsed with a few specific books in mind I was hoping to see, and ready to pounce at anything that even looked halfway interesting. I saw a good-sized section of Geoff Herbach’s books, and since I really liked the other two of his I’ve read (plus he did follow me on Twitter and all) I picked up his newest one, Anything You Want. As I went further down the table, I recognized a stack of copies of The Honest Truth by Dan Gemeinhart, another Middle Grade Minded contributor. Without hesitating, I shot my arm across the table and grabbed the one on the top, startling a girl who had been standing nearby and studying at the cover. She looked at me, then looked at the stack again, then looked back at me with an expression of “Really? It’s that good?” I smiled and nodded, so she picked it up, read the back, and added it to the pile she was carrying.
We had one session left before leaving, but I was shut out of the one I wanted since the room was practically full when I got there. I was totally fine with this, since I had a paper bag under my arm with three new books I could read.
The day turned out to be another typically great experience at the Young Author’s Conference, but the thing I kept reflecting on throughout the day was how I spent most of my time there feeling like I had a foot in two separate worlds. I was primarily there as a representative from Teacher World, and spent most of my time inside of that sphere. I wore the stick-on name tag, I was recognized by the others teachers as a chaperone, I was escorting kids around and helping out others I didn’t even know who seemed confused or lost, because that’s what teachers do at events like this.
But throughout the day I kept encountering these reminders that, even though Teacher World is the bigger part of my life right now, Author World is noticeably catching up. Never was this more apparent than the bus ride home. I was talking to one of my students, the girl who had been at Abby’s morning session with me. She hadn’t volunteered her ideas during the session (magical realism, in case that slipped your mind) so I asked what she wrote about, and this conversation happened:
“I wrote about that thing you did that one time, with the lunchbox.”
“What thing I did that one time with the lunchbox?”
“You know, when someone forgot their lunchbox, and you wrote that thing on the board. I wrote about the stuff people forget at school when they go home, and then all the stuff has a party at night but the custodian finds out.”
“You should’ve raised your hand! She would have thought that was so cool!”
She pauses and looks at me, somewhat suspiciously. “Why were you talking to her after?”
“Well, we kind of know each other.”
“Kind of?”
“We’ve known each other through Twitter for quite awhile, but this was the first time we’ve met in real life. So we talked a little bit.”
She paused again.
“Wait: You’re saying…that you know…Abby Cooper?!”
Now a few others who had seen Abby’s sessions overheard this and began to chime in: “You KNOW her? / How do you know her? / We went to her thing after lunch! / She was really fun! / She gave us these bookmarks! / She was so pretty! / I want to read her book when it comes out!”
It hit me right then, sitting in the back of a school bus full of middle graders mostly making animal and robot noises while we slowly trudged through pre-rush hour traffic: The way my girls were fangirling all over Abby wasn’t so drastically different from the low-grade starstruck fascination I’d felt during my first time I’d chaperoning the conference. Then I wondered: How would that aspiring writer version of me from years back feel about where I am now, and what my day at the 2016 conference had been like?
He'd probably be pretty darn excited to know that my present was going to be a part of his future. Then he’d probably say, “Okay, yeah, it’s great that took the time to process all of this and that you still have the blog going after all these years. But seriously dude, if you have all of this happening now, you must have some REAL writing business to deal with. Shouldn’t you go take care of that, so you can get us to that last step already?”
And he’d be right.
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