The Dystopian Tour 2011

For the past few months I had been counting the days to this event. On Tuesday night, I had a chance to meet two NY Times Best Selling authors. This was my BEA replacement...one day I will make it there! Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall was a top pick in 2010 and I was enamoured by the first book of her love dystopian trilogy, Delirium, released earlier this year. I had just finished Veronica Roth's adrenaline pumping Divergent. I enjoyed seeing Roth's main character, Tris, step outside her comfort zone and really giving it all she had!

The event began with a Q&A from Ajay Fry, the host of InnerSPACE and which was also being filmed, to air on last night's episode at 11 PM. Here's a little bit of what went down:

Lauren talked about being influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's idea that all great books are about love or death. She mixed that thought with the swine flu epidemic we were dealing with at the time, because when you really look at love you will see that it has a lot of symptoms in common with diseases. (I loved seeing these included in the book because it really is freaky to look at it this way. ) For Veronica, it all started with a vision of someone launching themselves off a roof and her wondering what would make a person do that. She was studying psychology at the time, in particular, the concept of using stimuli to remove fear and from there she thought that courage would bind the people together, then the rest of the story emerged.

"You can't drive a story forward without characters", according to Lauren Oliver. Characters are the key to making the story work. From a readers perspective, I found it interesting when Lauren admitted to writing not only for readers, but in helping her in a journey to get someplace. I had never really thought of it that way before. Veronica actually began writing Divergent from a male perspective, but it just didn't fit, so when she found Tris' voice, she knew she had it right.

And what do Lauren & Veronica think of ebooks? Both don't see it as a threat. As long as stories are being told, the medium doesn't matter. Veronica is like me and still wants to hold the books, so as long as we are still around, hard copies will be too. I wonder if Lauren was onto something when she mentioned ebooks becoming the norm and hard copies being available as special editions? Only time will tell.

Thanks so much to HarperCollins, Indigo, Lauren & Veronica for a fabulous night. For those of you in and around the Toronto area, tonight is the last stop for the tour. Head on over to Chapters Brampton at 7PM!


You'll have to trust me on this, from L-R is my bestie & fellow book blogger Jackie from My Ever Expanding Library, Lauren Oliver, Veronica Roth and moi! A special thanks goes to Jordan for being the photographer for the evening!