Thank you, Texas!

Hi everyone!

I’m home from the Texas Book Festival, and can I just say that the Lone Star State does book festivals right?

They set up big tents all around the grounds of the state capital and then fill the tents and surrounding churches and other buildings–and even the capital itself–with books and authors and readers and corndog vendors.

Really. Seriously. There are books AND corndogs. Does life ever get better than that?

It was amazing. Volunteers picked me up and dropped me off at the airport. There were fancy, swanky parties that festival supporters and employees generously threw in their own homes.

Pseudonymous Bosch and Sara Zarr and I spent a long time hanging out with a bunch of YA authors in our host’s bathroom. Yeah. It was a REALLY nice bathroom.

Everything was so well-organized that I didn’t think it could get any better…

And then I did my panel.

And what do you know? It DID get better! It really, really did!

The panel!
From Left to Right: moderator Jon Scieszka, Derrick Barnes,
Pseudonymous Bosch, me, and James A. Owen.

I’ve frequently said that writing a series is a slightly different type of writing, and it was a ton of fun to be on a panel with other people who “get it” and talk about how our series began and evolved and where we hope they might be going.

And, of course, there were fans! So many awesome fans! With awesome questions!

I’m genuinely grateful to everyone at the Texas Book Festival for a fabulous weekend. Also, many thanks to Disney-Hyperion for sending me and allowing me to get to know the fabulous Katherine Marsh and spend quality time with publicist extraordinaire, Deborah Bass.

It was fabulous!
-Ally

ps…as you Twitter followers might have heard, I had a big flowery bow thing in my hair even though I’m 99% sure I’m not a bow person. But being a Gallagher Girl is about challenging yourself and taking risks and…well…a bow seemed like a good place to start.

So what do you think, guys? To bow or not to bow. That is the question.