2013 Houston Book Rave Photos - FUN Texas Reader Event!

Jordan Dane

@JordanDane

 The first Houston Book Rave (HBR) happened on November 2, 2013 and featured over 60+ authors. Young adult authors were most represented, but many New Adult authors came and quite a number of self-published indie authors were also in attendance. Our official bookstore was Barnes & Noble, arranged by the HBR staff.


The advance publicity on this event brought quite a bit of traffic to my website from all over the country. Thanks to the organizers and to all the fabulous bloggers who helped make this event successful. The event was free for those who attended. To track attendance, organizers had participants download a free ticket and I’d heard nearly 800 were downloaded. HBR was sponsored by a number of publishers, including my house, HarlequinTeen.


The YA authors had the morning session where we decorated our tables and met with readers for two hours, not signing books until later. Instead we signed shirts, bags, book marks, etc. I wasn’t sure how I would like that format (no panel discussions), but I had a blast. We had great traffic through the rooms and got to meet some fun people. Lots of young readers and reviewers were there. After we had our social time, our next assignment was to sign books in a larger room with all the authors and the bookstore on the floor (the size of a gym).
 
 


I shared my table with YA author extraordinaire Jennifer Archer (Through Her Eyes, Shadow Girl-HarperTeen). Jenny and I have known each other for awhile so we had tons of fun catching up. She’s a little shy and I AM NOT. I had noise makers and had her laughing at my antics. (Thankfully she has a great sense of humor.) We had Halloween candy and signed Milk Dud boxes – pretty much anything. We had more people coming over to our table to have a good time.


There were many young readers who came looking for us. Scarlett (in the neck scarf) was with her dad (smart man) and is a review blogger who had purchased my book - On a Dark Wing. I had all my released HarlequinTeen books there.

Here are some personal stories:


Here’s our decorated table. We went with the Halloween theme since we had leftover candy. Duh! As you can see, Jenny and I signed ANYTHING, including the Milk Duds. Hot commodity.

 
 


One fan brought baked goods. Doesn’t this look yummy. So good!!!

 
 

This is a photo of me with Emily (a young author who I met at the Texas Library Association annual conference two years ago). I had seen Emily at two TLA events and talked to her about a book she was writing. I never forgot her. Well, her mom came to the HBR and brought this photo memory of when Emily and I last met. She had asked her mom to get me to sign it. (Emily couldn’t make HBR, but through her mom, she was there in spirit.) Emily has aspirations to become an editor in the publishing industry. With her love of writing and reading, she will be a hit.


  I love Emily...and her mom. xxoo


Savannah (on the right) is an amazing  book blogger who has read/reviewed my YAs. She introduced me to one of her reviewers, Chayse (left). The purple shirts were the attire of HBR staff, so you can see both of these two enthusiastic readers were there to help. I LOVED hanging out with them, including sharing a table at our Friday night BBQ as we decorated our spots. I can’t say enough about Savannah and Chayse. <3 (They are both adorable.)

 



Another GO TO person I found there was Misty Baker of the Kindle Obsessed Blog. Man, she is organized and knows her stuff. She was a great help to all the authors and to the HBR organizers. Wish I had a photo of her. She is a lovely lovely person. xxoo Misty!


I wanted to share my photos. If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen some of these. I had fun tweeting ANYTHING from HBR. This event is definitely on my radar for next year. Anytime an author can spend quality time with readers, reviewers, and bloggers, it is a good thing. 


My next promo event will be the Austin Texas Comic Con on the weekend of Nov 22. OMG! I’m a Comic Con virgin, but I am looking forward to it. I will be joining the Writing Ninjas of Texas who have two tables in prime corner position. I will definitely post photos from this traveling circus.
 

 

 

 

Jordan Dane’s Crystal Fire (HarlequinTeen-The Hunted Series) now available for pre-order. Release is Nov 26, 2013.

Neural Coupling: Our Brains on Stories

In my latest, and still being shopped SciFi novel, I play with the idea of a cognitive link between my two protagonists. It starts out with randomly transmitted thoughts, proceeds to visual images, emotions and even smells that slip into each other’s brains. As it turns out, a type of a mind connection happens more than we realize and it’s called neural coupling. Think Spock and the Vulcan mind meld. Think of every story you’ve ever read involving telepathy and now transfer that idea to writer and reader.

Reading and writing are two different activities, but there are times the writer and reader are on the same wavelength. Why? Because something peculiar happens in the brain when a reader is engaged in a compelling story. The reader’s brain registers the same emotions that the writer is creating with words on the page. This connection can be observed using MRI technology, which is exactly what neuroscientist Uri Hasson from Princeton did. “The brains of the person telling a story and listening to it can synchronize.” And this connection doesn’t stop with emotions. When reading about taste or smell, think of those feasts in Game of Thrones, the part of the brain that engages with taste and smell lights up. The same response occurs when we are immersed in a movie. Have you ever noticed how many people move their lips when watching a scene that involves a kiss?

And here’s an interesting tidbit for writers. Cliché phrases don’t activate the brain in the same way. They don’t activate the frontal cortex. This means that not all stories are equally effective at creating neural coupling. Because I’m a writer, I can’t help asking what stories create the most powerful c. Because that’s the kind of story I want to write. I’m guessing they are the stories that explore universal human emotions. No matter how intricate the plot, how beautiful the prose, how high the concept, if the story isn’t one the reader can relate to on an emotional level the coupling isn’t as strong. And as writer’s we want the strongest connection we can forge with our readers. But there’s still a bit of a mystery here. Why do I connect more strongly with one person than with another or with one particular author?  There must be something similar in our mental make-up or existing experiences that makes us resonate.

We think in narratives. We remember in narratives. We use stories to connect with other people, to explain events in our lives, and to explain our own behavior to ourselves. Stories are the cosmic glue that connects us all.

I bid you adieu

As with so many good things we encounter in our lives, my time with the wonderful, inspiring, welcoming family here at ADR3NALIN3 must come to an end. It saddens me to part with such a great group of people that have brought a much needed dose of happy to my life, but a well of things have lined up before me and time waits for no one. I am ever so thankful to have had this experience, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

To those who frequent this blog, I urge you to continue to do so. This collection of talent and wisdom is insurmountable, and there is much to learn from these posts. 

To those I have shared this time with, thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for making me feel welcome and an instant part of the group. I've learned so much from each of you that I will take with me going forward.

So long, farewell, goodbye, dear friends.

Read on, always.

Think like a Writer

Sechin Tower

@SechinTower

In a recent post, I made an argument for including creative writing in school curricula. Here’s another advantage: everybody, regardless of their profession, can benefit from thinking like a writer.

I’m not saying that all students should aim to become novelists any more than a P.E. teacher would suggest that all the kids in her 5^th period class should set their sights NFL careers. Nor am I trying to argue that it’s the only proper way to think: people should never stop experimenting and weighing evidence like a scientist, or sequentially calculating results like a mathematician, or seeking causes and connections like a historian.

Creative writing isn’t the only window through which one should view the world, but it’s at least as valuable an approach as any other. Everybody can benefit from practicing the habits of mind required to be a writer.

For starters, writing demands knowledge. Anyone who’s ever written a novel will testify that stories are ravenous beasties that will gobble up everything you ever thought you knew and then come back for seconds. For any given piece, a writer might need to delve into the history of the French revolution, or current trends in emergency medicine, or Creole table manners, or the predictions to be tested by the CERN particle accelerator. You might even have to investigate all of the above—I’d love to read that book!

A writer must develop an insatiable curiosity about the little wonders all around us—the color of a sidewalk after a rainstorm, the texture of a dandelion leaf, the crooked finger on the bus driver’s right hand. Fully half of this knowledge will never be useful, but one never knows which half. “Write what you know” is absolutely true, and therefore you can never know enough. A writer must be a compulsive collector of ideas and experiences, and that’s a good way to live.

It’s not enough to simply observe and know, because a writer must weave all these things into something new. How does a treasure-hunting crew in the Caribbean navigate international banking laws? If a vacationing detective found his hotel room burglarized, whom would he call first? What effect would an electromagnetic pulse have on a cell phone? Failing to answer questions like that could result in phony characters and yawning gaps in the plot.

On top of all that, the story must form a cohesive whole inside a reader’s mind. This is one of the most challenging tasks in any profession, and it cannot be accomplished through sentences fragments or text-message contractions because the slightest bobble could break the reader out of the delicate cocoon of willing disbelief. Creative writing is more than just making up stories, it’s the science of how the human brain makes sense of the world and the art of structuring words to expand that sense.

In my class, the idea that creative writing is really about refining human experience and ideas usually doesn’t win over a lot of students right away, but that’s okay because we have a whole  semester for me to show what it mean. I start by giving them free rein to pick their topics, and for many of them this is a first. You didn’t like Holden’s view of the world in Catcher in the Rye? Okay, give me your view. Sick of writing essays about history? No problem, just make up your own history. Or your own future. Within a few weeks, one by one, they get sucked into their stories, and they start to find that they need to search out more from the world around them than they had ever needed to in the past.

It’s not as important to me that they become novelists as it is that they learn to think like writers. At least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. 

Be good, and dream crazy dreams,

Sechin Tower is a teacher, a table-top game designer, and the author of Mad Science Institute. You can read more about him and his books on SechinTower.com and his games on SiegeTowerGames.com