encouraged by another user: i met you at book expo and you surpassed my expectations. i hope you know you have such a great smile and laugh and you were so gracious. next time i'll get the courage to get a picture WITH you rather than taking a stalker-ish

Dear theleiaorgana,

This is a really lovely message to get, thank you, more so now than ever. BookCon was really such a riot of mixed experiences for me — it’s my first big release since I got sick, my first Con I’ve attempted since starting to get better, and it’s the first weekend I got to see how folks would react to me returning to beloved characters.

It was insanely hard on my body, which I thought was getting better. By the first night of BookCon, I’d reverted to a very much earlier stage of my recovery, and making it through the second day involved pulling myself off my shower floor and saying GET IT TOGETHER STIEFVATER. I was supposed to drive to Toronto by that evening for my seminar and instead I ended up passing out by the side of the interstate several times before hauling into Buffalo with badly slurring speech and low morale. I was hopeful I’d be able to tour more for Hawk, but that hope was pretty well dashed. 

It was also very weird to go overnight from my relatively pleasant, neutral existence on the internet to once again having a toxic inbox calling me ‘m*ggie’ and describing why I don’t ‘deserve rights.’ Since TRC simmered down and reached equilibrium, I had forgotten what that was like. It’s not really about living with fandom hate; it’s more about how difficult it is to live with folks hating a version of you that doesn’t exist. I’d hoped Hawk’s fandom on Tumblr might be a different experience — something fun, adventurous, playful, positive, story-centered rather than me-centered — but I’m in the midst now of trying to decide how much I’ll be here on Tumblr this fall. I don’t really have another three years of a whispered and snarled m*ggie stief/vater fandom experience in me, not with everything else happening, not with the rest of the world looking like it does. When it’s @ed or message to me, it drowns out all the fun voices and questions that are entertaining, hilarious, and thought-provoking to engage with, and I have to say, after losing my words and thoughts for months and months and fighting so hard to get my brain back, it just feels empty. 

BUT the Con itself was so wonderful — meeting readers who had been with me since the beginning and readers who had just mainlined TRC or the Shiver series or even Pip Bartlett and readers I recognized from Twitter handles and readers who shared stories of how the books moved things around in their lives in cool and funny and meaningful ways. Seeing other authors gleaming with excitement over debuts they were finally getting to sign for their very first readers, and publishers literally jumping up and down with excitement over stories they were excited to get out in the world.

I got to see one of the only advanced review copies of Call Down the Hawk (they wouldn’t even let me hold it) and thrill at its existence.

And then I got to hear the giddy delight of those looking forward to Hawk. What a glorious charge to the heart as I’m working on book 2. I love this job.

So … like I said, mixed experience, all the feelings! Messages like this are really appreciated, so again, thank you, for making storytelling and Tumblr worth it.

urs,

Stiefvater