I promised to take you along on some of my Paris experiences now that I’m living in the city full-time. So how about accompanying me to the designer Oscar Carvallo’s fashion week party?

I met Oscar at a peniche party a few months ago, during which he said he wanted to do the costumes for a DIE FOR ME film if one were ever made. So when I got an invitation last week to his end-of-Paris-fashion-week party, I didn’t hesitate to accept.

However, about an hour before party-start last night I was on Twitter begging for makeup tips from my friends at Epic Reads as well as make-up experts (okay, YA writers) Natalie Parker and Tessa Gratton. After leaving a pile of discarded dresses and shoes strewn across my apartment, I came up with this:

Revenants meet fashionistas...at least in my mind

As for the rest, I will let the photos & captions speak for themselves. Welcome to your Paris fashion experience!

Me with the man of the evening, Oscar Carvallo

One of Oscar's dresses that I was lusting over

and yet another that I wasn't sure I could ever pull off, but I still had to worship it.

the space

One of the perks of fashion week: male models. (This cutie's name is Sulabh Kalra and he lives in Milan.)

another perk: very interesting characters. This guy wasn't happy when I asked if his outfit was steampunk.

girl in the middle: the singer Inna Modja

fancy headgear

And last but not least, my friend Laila standing next to the house model, who is "retired" at age 31 and has a PhD in biochemistry and does AIDS research. (Um...where was I when they were passing out superhero genes?)

So – what do you think of your first Paris Fashion Week party? Tell me in the comments below and let me know what else you want me to bring you along to!

I had thought about writing a whole huge blog post about my recent week with Tara Hudson, Natalie C Parker, Anna Carey, Tessa Gratton and Josephine Angelini. But when I looked over the pictures and stories I wanted to use I realized it would take me hours and hours as well as pages and pages. So I’m going to let the pictures and their captions do the talking for me. I’ll just set the scene:

A few months ago I invited my book buddies Josephine Angelini and Tara Hudson to visit me in France. I told them that some day I wanted to get a ton of writer friends together, but since I just moved to Paris (and with life being a bit crazy lately) I wanted to keep things small. I asked them if they wanted to bring a friend or two. Josie invited Anna Carey and Tara invited Tessa Gratton and Natalie C Parker. And wham-bang, just like that we had us a writer’s retreat!

The group descended upon my Paris apartment on September 16. As soon as the last taxi arrived from Charles de Gaule airport, we jumped on a train to go to my Loire Valley farmhouse. And here is the story in pics:

Train to the Loire Valley (yes, believe it or not, everyone is jetlagged)

Look at what Josie found on an outing to my country supermarket!

Natalie displaying her lettuce-folding skills. (Click on this picture if you want to know why.)

Grocery shopping at the weekly Bourgueil market

All that shopping made us thirsty...wine before noon, hurray! (At least the glasses are tiny.)

What we were supposed to be doing. (Working.)

What we were actually doing. (Working...with breaks for liquid refreshment)

Which degenerated into…

...ditching work and concentrating on liquid refreshments. (As you can imagine, there was a LOT of storytelling going on.)

We did take short breaks from our incessant eating, drinking and talking to take in some culture…

...like wine tasting in a 12th-generation family vineyard.

Eating huge slabs of cheese and meat at Cafe de la Promenade in Bourgueil.

Oh, right…the last two count as drinking and eating, don’t they? Okay, well we did go to a…

...medieval castle (the Chateau de Langeais), where absolutely no eating or drinking took place while we were within the castle walls.

Since I used to work there, I took the girls on my super-duper guided tour, where I knew everything except the things they asked me questions about.

We impressed the locals with our serious authorly attitude towards their revered history.

After all that culture we had to go back to the eating and drinking. Thank the gods we're all such culinary geniuses...

...especially Anna, who almost set the kitchen on fire when lighting cognac over her stew, which I secretly suspect was a ploy to check out the local fire department's "talent."

After 4 days of eating, drinking, talking and working extremely extremely hard producing chapter upon chapter of prose that can only be described as pure genius*, we hopped back on the train and waved goodbye to the Loire Valley.

NEXT UP: French Invasion Part 2, Authors Abscond to Paris

*this part added for our editors and agents
who know our deadlines only too well

Storming the castle: Josephine Angelini, Anna Carey, Natalie C Parker, Tessa Gratton, Tara Hudson, Amy Plum

Five YA authors have joined me in the land of runny cheese and crispy baguettes, and we want you to join in the fun. Epic Reads will be broadcasting us live tomorrow night (Friday, 21 September from 3:30-4:00pm EST).

Details on how to see the broadcast are here.

Submit your questions in the comments below or by Twitter as noted in the link above. If you have a question for all of us or just one of us, ask away!!!

Are you ready? This is big. No, not big. Huge. The UK cover of the last book of the UNTIL I DIE trilogy — IF I SHOULD DIE — is now ready to reveal. (Although HarperTeen will be making changes for the US version!)

It’s awesome. It’s spooky. It is…to die for.

Johanna Basford and Mark Ecob are officially queen and king of book cover art. Thank you Little, Brown Atom for the creeptastic delicious swirly romantic face for the epic conclusion of the DIE FOR ME stories!

Last year I ran an offer for signed bookplates, and people seemed to enjoy it so much that I feel like doing it again. If you haven’t already seen them, here they are. Aren’t they pretty? The drawings were done by Johanna Basford, the Scottish artist who drew the swirls on the cover of DIE FOR ME and UNTIL I DIE.

My gorgeous bookplates are produced by BookPlateInk.com

And this is what it will look like inside your book:

The plates are my gifts to anyone who writes an Amazon and/or Barnes & Noble review for DIE FOR ME or UNTIL I DIE. Just send me an email to amy attt amy plum books dottt com (take out the extra “t”s, add appropriate punctuation, and squish everything together) telling me what your Amazon and/or B&N user name is and your mailing address, and I will send it to you.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to write a novel-unless you want to. Just a sentence is fine! And let me make this very clear – you can leave WHATEVER review you want. I am not buying positive reviews here. Just say what you thought of the book(s), and that’s good enough for me!

You can receive a total of 4 bookplates – two for the 2 books on Amazon and two for the 2 books on B&N (which means 2 for you and 2 for a friend if you wish), and the offer is international.

Thank you all for your enthusiastic support!