Meeting Amie Kaufman, Rainbow Rowell & Jay Kristoff/ Part 1: Amie & Jay
Luna & Saturn
August 31, 2016
2 Comments
Hi everyone! We hope you’re having a wonderful time. Today, we’re going to be talking about how we met Amie Kaufman, Rainbow Rowell and Jay Kristoff at the Melbourne Writers' Festival!!!!!!!!
Our session was Pleasures of Fandom with Amie Kaufman and Rainbow Rowell as the guest speakers. Jay Kristoff was sitting in the audience.
It was overall, a nice session. Unfortunately, due to technical issues, their accompanying slideshow wouldn’t work, but we suppose that without the slideshow, nothing detracted from the authors’ speaking - and their speaking was great!
In Part 1, we’ll put a focus on Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff - even though Jay was in the audience. This will prevent an incredibly long post.
To begin with, Amie is a natural speaker - naturally funny and engaging. Amie had been writing from a young age and shared a funny story about how she and her friend would write fanfiction in physics class, but her friend had an exceptional ability to both listen to the teacher and write fanfiction, so at the end of the year, there was a huge difference in scores. Amie laughingly complained it felt like betrayal because she thought they were both bailing out on physics together.
We think what the Amie brought up was amazing - that for some reason or another, fanfiction is frowned upon and, as Amie put it, “Fanfiction is like the other F word”. Amie said nothing is wrong with fanfiction, and Rainbow wholeheartedly agreed (unsurprising considering what Fangirl is about!).
Amie loves how Australia is viewed in other nations. Rainbow talked about her preconceived views of Australia (more details in Part 2!), and Amie affirmed that many Americans do think Australia is absolutely dangerous, because we have drop bears other murderous creatures. It didn’t seem to help that Amie likes to agree with these stories. She told an American about the dangerous drop bears but forgot to mention they were fake.
When asked about what she thought about co-writing - since she has co-written with Jay Kristoff and Meagan Spooner - she complained that with Jay Kristoff in the audience, she can’t say much; “Terrible” was what she sneakily commented. In actuality though, Amie absolutely loves co-writing, especially when she emails her book, the next morning there is “more book” than what she started with.
It turns out that when Amie doesn’t know what to write, she’ll just write a huge explosion because it guarantees a reaction. She says that’s what’s good about writing; if it were a movie, people would be questioning the cost of the special effects to have an explosion, whereas in books, she can do as she pleases.
One thing Amie mentioned that was really interesting, was when she was asked what advice she would give for teenage writers, she said that they should read. Amie says writers read, and that they “inhale and consume books”.
One thing Amie mentioned that was really interesting, was when she was asked what advice she would give for teenage writers, she said that they should read. Amie says writers read, and that they “inhale and consume books”.
Amie and Jay put in a lot of effort into their Illuminae casualty list, and said they tried mixing the most common surnames in different countries to show that in the future, multiculturalism is a norm. Amie and Jay also put in all female or male families, and some people had two fathers too, because Amie and Jay said they wanted to show all sorts of people exist. Their editor had not sent them the first batch of photos being considered for the casualty list because the editor thought it was too “white”.
On a funny note, the names of families, friends, co-workers and others were put into the casualty list, as well as their own names! They put in George R.R Martin’s name because they said he has killed enough people – maybe by killing George, he can’t kill their favourite characters (check page 56)!
The only thing we felt was slightly off was how Amie said that everyone there wanted Rainbow’s autograph. Amie! You and Jay are both equally stunning authors in your own right. Amie is no one’s shadow, she is amazing!!!!!!!! If we reviewed Illuminae, we’d give it a 6 out of 5!
With the session wrapped up, we went to get out books signed. Rainbow’s line was sooooooooo long, and we were SO DISAPPOINTED to see Amie and Jay had no line! Amie and Jay are both AMAZING writers, but it might’ve been that Rainbow had the ‘American’ aura around her, and people thought this was their only chance to meet her.
Amie and Jay were absolutely nice and amazing and all things wonderful. They managed to have a small conversation with us, and said hello for our friend’s booktube channel! There’s this video we took of them saying hello. We love how Jay writes “Fight like girls”! When we mentioned we entered the competition for the Gemina casualty list, but we might not be on the list because we didn’t realise Pacific time if different to our time, Jay cheered us up and said there’ll be more chances in the third Illuminae books.
