Teen Readers' Diary: 03/15/16

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Recap: Victoria Aveyard's Book Signing Event in Manila

It has been months since we get to attend to a book signing and talk to our blogger friends again since #CTCinPH book signing event. So imagine our excitement when last February, National Bookstore announced that Victoria Aveyard, author of Red Queen, will visit here in the Philippines for a two day book signing event. YAY!

Last Sunday, March 6, Victoria arrived almost exactly as the forum was scheduled to begin–which was awesome because we were super excited to meet the person behind the powerful and amazing Red Queen series.

Read on to know what we learned about Victoria Aveyard, her books, and her writing process during the fun and informative Q&A!

Victoria Aveyard’s advice to aspiring writers is you need to finish your first draft. Write the end at the end. Don’t edit yourself too much, give yourself the benefit of the doubt.
It usually the world or an image that comes to her first when writing her books.
The most important part for her when writing is the characters. She believes that character is what makes a reader stay in the story. So it is very important to create characters that readers could relate to.
In terms of writing high tension scenes, Victoria says that that was the “easy” part for her, those were her favorite part to write. And romantic scenes were her weakness and she thinks that writing kissing scenes is harder than a long battle sequence. Victoria’s advice for aspiring writers who wanted to write these scenes was to read stuff like that and see how your favorite author do scenes like that and sort of internalize the language of those scenes.
The quiet scenes are always the hard one for her. Scenes which are sort of regrouping after something bad happened. In Red Queen the entire middle of the book is really very difficult for her. Because a lot of it was build up and lot is learning of the world.
The first screenplay she ever wrote was a zombie western apocalypse.
In other news, Universal studios has the film option to Red Queen. Victoria says that she have met all the producer, the director and everything that they wanted is happening right now for the story.
Her top 3 fantasies: Lord of the rings, which she had the book for two years until the pages fell apart. Harry Potter and Song of Ice and Fire, which had a lot of influence with Red queen.
She learned all story telling trick she knew from film school. Victoria says that from film, pacing is totally key, you need to get on your scene as much as possible. Knowing your audience is very important. In terms on which one she prefers between Film and Novel she says that she prefers the one which she wasn’t writing at the moment.
Victoria’s inspirations for her names came out of thin air originally but she wanted to put sort of romance in there. So what she does is she did a lot of Latin translations of words like Air or water. For abilities, she looked for Wikipedia and just sorted out the abilities that she would use in the story that would reflect each characters.
As far as literary betrayals go, one of the things that inspired her was Game of Thrones. Another one that really hurt for her was Serius Black and Dumbledore deaths. She also said that taking away the mentor or the one you lean to be is one of the storytelling 101.
In terms of writing, Victoria said that she want to keep writing until the day she died. After Red Queen she probably would do some more screenplays to keep muscles working meaning switching from medium to medium. She also want to continue writing fantasy. After Red Queen, she is signed to one more book to HarperCollins.
She likes genre mashups. Victoria tag herself as a kitchen sink writer and just write the story she likes.
More of emotional journey can be expected in Mare’s story in the latter books.
The scientific background or explanation when Silver and Red split both ways was actually a result of nuclear warfare and mutation a couple of thousand years before this world happen.
As per Victoria they were still not set on the title of the 3^rd book. A couple of characters who were not in Glass Sword much would probably be in the 3^rd book more.

After the Q&A we lined up to have our books signed and interact with her one-on-one.

Of course we can't pass the opportunity to model Red Queen and Glass Sword in flesh (haha)

JM of Book Freak Revelations, Salve of Cuckoo for Books and Kevin of Tomebound

Victoria was such a cool and nice person, she even let us take a video message for our friend who didn't get to attend to the signing!

With some of our bloggers friends <3 (Photo by Algel of Tea-rrificreads)

Victoria Aveyard with the PH YA Book Bloggers! (Photo by Kate of The Bookaholic Blurbs)

After the event we then went to the Public Signing. The photos below didn't do any justice to the people who went to the event. As per NBS, there were around 1200 and more people who attend the signing, CRAZZZY! I think no one ever expected, not even NBS that there will be so many readers who will attend, I mean they had to cut the line to 1200 and this was just in Manila signing! #PoweofBookLove

To end this recap we just wanted to thank National Book Store for making all these awesome events happen and to Victoria for being such a great person!