Mermaid’s Mirror Author L.K. Madigan Rocks at Wordstock!

Earlier this month, Wordstock Festival took over Portland, Oregon — and our October Book of the Month author L.K. Madigan was one of the featured YA authors, there to talk about The Mermaid’s Mirror. Of course, if you’ve been paying attention lately, you also know that Novel Novice’s Sara has spent the last year serving as Wordstock’s YA/Children’s Author Coordinator. She and Steph (clumzbella) were at Wordstock all weekend to catch the action — and of course, we were front and center for Lisa Madigan’s shining moments.

First things first … Lisa joined fellow YA authors Conrad Wesselhoeft, Patrick Ness and Anne Osterlund on a panel called “YA Gets Real” — all about addressing serious subject matters in YA lit. Here’s a snippet of what Lisa had to say, in which she directly addresses our own Stephanie and her question about what her next book will be:

During her individual presentation on The Mermaid’s Mirror, Lisa also talked about how she’s loved mermaid’s for many years — and even shared this early story from her childhood, which she illustrated herself:

Adorable, right?

Of course, we also spent some time hanging out with Lisa (and some of the many other awesome YA authors around that weekend). But Lisa really blew us away when she popped over and pulled two boxes out of her purse. “I have a little something for you guys,” she said, handing them over. A thank you, she said, for all the work we’d been putting into this month’s features. Well, needless to say, we were a bit surprised — I mean, we do this sort of stuff all the time at Novel Novice. But we were incredibly overwhelmed and excited when we opened the boxes to find these awesome gifts from Lisa:

Yep, Lisa got us matching Mermaid’s Mirror necklaces — and they really are so freaking cool.