I finally met #ShaunTan (happy, happy dance)

In case you're new here, the one thing I can tell you about me is, I can't get enough of Shaun Tan.

I had never been to a national SCBWI conference before the one that just happened in New York, and all it took for me to get there was to see Shaun Tan's name on the keynote speaker list. I swear I was the first one in line.

My first meeting with Shaun went pretty much like this: On Friday, the first day of the conference, I was on the elevator by myself heading up to my hotel room on the 30th floor. When the elevator stopped, the doors opened and there waiting to get on, by himself, was Shaun Tan. I sucked in a breath, but somehow nothing came out. We stepped aside for each other to enter and exit. The doors closed between us

I spent Saturday morning waiting for a moment (and finding the nerve for) when he wasn't busy talking to somebody else. When I finally caught him waiting for the elevator yet again, I introduced myself and told him he was the reason I was at the conference. The elevator opened, we stepped in and joined a couple of other people already inside. I had barely started talking again when the nice lady beside me reached out her hand to Shaun and said, "Hi. I'm Jane Yolen. We've actually met before."

Not kidding.

Then the other lady in the elevator said, "Shaun Tan and Jane Yolen in the same elevator together. What are the chances!"

Yes. What are the chances.

We didn't have a chance to say any more before the elevator stopped at his floor (our floor), and he got out.

I did not.

Finally, on the last day of the conference just before our train left the station (literally; we rode the train to NY), I was working the autograph party as an SCBWI Illustrator Coordinator and waited for my opportunity. Shaun signed books for three hours straight (an hour longer than he was scheduled), and after the line disappeared, I finally (finally) got my photo op.

As you can see, he signed all his books for me, even though he had been sitting there for three hours. He was kind, patient and unassuming, and if his two had been the only talks I had heard all weekend, I would have left completely satisfied.

First Neil Gaiman last November, and now Shaun Tan. That's it. Is there really anybody else?

I guess I can die happy.

@neilhimself and geekiness and what one is willing to do about it

I guess it's official: I've become a writing geek. I don't know any other kind of person who would keep themselves awake until all hours just to nab tickets to see a writer talk.

I found out a couple of weeks ago that Neil Gaiman was going to speak at the Carnegie Music Hall at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh nine days after my birthday. My reaction involved many, many exclamation points which, I've learned, real writers are expected to avoid.

To add to the overuse of punctuation, Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures were also going to have a post-lecture party where you could actually meet Neil and he would sign a book for you. (Oh! Get out!) The problem was, you had to buy a VIP ticket to get in, and the Music Hall isn't all that big (1,950 seats total), and there would be a limited number of VIP tickets for sale, and they were expected to go fast, and they were $55 each.

When I explained all of this to my lovely husband, he said, "I think you need to get the VIP tickets." And, being the lovely husband that he is, agreed to go with me and give me the tickets for my birthday! (How do you finish that sentence without using an exclamation point?)

The tickets were to go on sale at 12:01 AM, August 27. That was wonderful, except that I'm brain dead by 10 PM, and can't remember the last time I willfully stayed awake until midnight. But it was imperative that I did.

I had the site up by 11:30 just to get a feel for what I would have to do, which in the end didn't really help much. When my computer clock hit 12:01, I hit "Reload" on my page and went to work. I picked "Best seats available" and "2" tickets and "VIP" and clicked to go to the next page, and a little ticker up in the right-hand corner started counting down the amount of time I had to finish the sale before the tickets would go back in the pool.

No pressure or anything.

O.K. 14 minutes.

But the next page asked for my login information. That's when the panic started to set in. I had lost my hard drive a few months ago where I used to keep a .doc file with all my user names and passwords listed. I've been slowly building the file back up from scratch, but I hadn't bought tickets from Pgh Arts & Lectures since the hard drive funeral, and I had no idea what my login information used to be. I had the bright idea that I could just register a new account, and when I typed my email in and made up a new password, the site informed me that I already had an account.

13 minutes. 12 minutes.

I decided to have them reset my password, but that meant they had to email me a link to do that.

11 minutes. 10 minutes. 9 minutes.

(Yes, I was feeling the sweat, too.)

With my password reset, I double-checked my order (quickly) and gave them my credit card number.

8 minutes. Ugh!

But one final click and happy ending! The beautiful bundle arrived in the mail a few days ago:

And you see that staple up the left-hand side? That means something very special was attached to the back of the ticket.

Something very, very special.

A Little Like Shaun Tan

A few weeks ago I finally made my way to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I wasn't there to visit the place, although we have plans of returning next year for actual Gettysburg reasons. So much history. I feel so attracted to something there.

But this post isn't supposed to be about Gettysburg.

I hauled my butt across half the state for an SCBWI conference, and yeah, I came home with lots of thoughts to think loudly about. But I'll attempt to narrow those thoughts down to just one: Jordan Brown.

I had a manuscript critique with Jordan, a Senior Editor at Walden Pond Press and Balzer + Bray, imprints of HarperCollins Children's Books. The story I had written was a short story I had finished for a fiction writing class I took about eight years ago (has it been that long?). My professor at the time loved it, and in his comments at the end wrote, "Get it published."

And yet.

The story wasn't long enough. I knew it wouldn't make a complete book. But, being an illustrator—and pictures are easier for me than words—I had the brilliant idea (I thought, at the time) to pad the short story with pictures to make it long enough. Maybe even convert it into a graphic novel (Mr. Punch-style). Yeah. A graphic novel. Then the words would be at a minimum, and I could tell a lot of the story just using images.

Yeah. Images.

But Jordan didn't really agree.

He was thinking more along the lines of, say, a novel.

"You mean those things with all the words?"

"Those things with all the words."

But there was something in the story he had latched onto. Something he didn't want me to lose as I was writing more. Something he likened to...

Shaun Tan.

Shaun Tan? Really? How could he know?

What he liked about what I had written was all the stuff I hadn't written. How you didn't know when or where the story was taking place. Was it in the past? Or the future? Or was it even on this planet?

He totally got it.

He said it seemed like I was working in the sort of space that Shaun Tan occupies (not bad company to be in), but a very difficult one to break into (not what I wanted to hear).

It wasn't until I read this article in the Guardian today (and written by Neil Gaiman, no less) that I realized how right Jordan was. The paring things down. The fictional landscape. The far future, the distant past.

I had decided before I left the conference to take Jordan's advice and write the whole thing as a novel. He even suggested I take a look at A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, not just for the loss of the protagonist's mother, but also (as I figured out when I got the book) for the illustrations. They're beautiful. I thought, yeah, writing all those words is going to take a while, but I can supplement all those words with some really cool pictures.

Pictures. My comfort food.

But as soon as I finished the book that little doubt devil started spewing into my brain again, and I started growing doubt shoots. Doubts about all those words. A Monster Calls was good. It was really, really good. And heavy (in a deep sense, not in a weight one). Can I really write something as relevant as that? Why am I doubting my writing? Why am I dragging my feet with this story?

What am I afraid of?

I won't be able to start writing for a few days anyway, so in the small spurts of time I have until then, I've decided to absorb a little Shaun Tan. The Rabbits. Tales from Outer Suburbia. The Lost Thing. I'm hoping in the time we spend together Shaun will help me find the confidence I'm thinking must be lurking around here somewhere.

And then after that, if I've been good, I can get back to the pictures.

British un-things

Have you noticed the books out semi-lately with "un" things as main characters?

• The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall, published in 2007 (un-Space and the Un-Space Exploration Committee)
• Un Lun Dun by China Miéville, also published in 2007 (Un-London and pretty much everything else)
• And not quite, but along those same lines: Coraline by Neil Gaiman, published in 2002 (Coraline had an "other" mother)

The link between them might be in the water; all of the authors are currently living in or were originally from England. That and, whether you like the books or not, critics have widely agreed that at the very least these authors have created unique worlds and ideas and display incredible imagination in their writing.