Plummy Update #1

Tomorrow I’m going to EDINBURGH!!! HURRAY!!!

(Can you tell I’m just a teensy bit excited?)

This is what happened: I was invited to speak at the Edinburgh Book Festival. I’m doing a talk on the 27th, which you can buy tickets for here, and then a panel with KJ Wignall which you can’t buy tickets for unless you’re a Scottish school child, in which case you’re coming with your class.

So I was all excited about it and decided to extend my stay a few days so that I could see some other authors talk. And then I got the program for the 3-week festival and decided to lump a whole extra week on. I’ll be there the first and third weeks of the festival, just basically hanging out and attending about a kagillion events.

BUT…if you are at the Edinburgh Festival and want to find me to say hello or have me sign something, I will probably be at UNBOUND every night in the Guardian Spiegeltent from 9pm-11pm. The days I’m there: August 12-17 and 24-28.

And now for the real reason I am attending Week 1 of the Festival. Two words: Neal Gaiman.

I love him. I love him in the same way that I love Gene Wilder, who I fell madly in love with the first time I saw his frizzy hair sticking out from underneath that velvet top hat. (I was nine.) I, however, have never written Gene Wilder an embarrassing gushy fan letter and will certainly never meet him. Thankfully, I wrote Neal’s letter using my real name, so his bodyguards won’t have “Amy Plum” on their stalker alert list.

The event was sold out before I could even get my Author Ticket Request Form in, but I pleaded my case with a few key festival organizers, and they gifted me with a Director’s ticket. Who knows what that means, but if I am back stage, you will be sure that I will have a photo of Neil & me up here as fast as you can say Twitter.

Plummy Update #2

I turned in my copyedits for IF I SHOULD DIE today. Which means I get to start work on JUNEAU, my HarperTeen book that will be coming out in 2014! I can’t even tell you how excited I am about that. I’m bringing my notes along to Edinburgh for any down-time I have, since I’m thinking that with all of those authors in one place, inspiration is going to be drifting around like a thick fog. I’ll just have to breathe it in, and I’ll be writing magical prose.

Plummy Update #3

I never know what I’m going to be asked to do in my job. Take part in a “who has the hottest protag” contest, tell some interviewer what kind of undies Vincent wears, or send birthday greetings to someone’s friend halfway across the world. Yesterday I got a new one: a Tweeter asked me and 2 other authors to come up with a name for their rescue cat, who happened to have a peculiar genetic deformation. I was happy to oblige. My perfect name for a 12-toed cat? “The Duke of Dozen.”

Plummy Update #4

I passed a Paris clothes shop called “Jules” the other day and saw these posters in the window.

So I knew I had to take a photo for you. And it wasn’t until I took the group-shot that I saw what was printed on the one in the front:

Um…yeah. Weird, right?

Plummy Update #5 (which is not really an update)

And finally, my favorite recent quote:

“I love him, I love him, I’m so sorry.”

If you guess who this is, you win…nothing. Except the knowledge that you too were once a Twihard. And Twihards never die. They just spend the rest of eternity skipping around Forks in a peasant dress.