13 Days of Halloween: Laini Taylor and My Daughter of Smoke and Bone Weekend

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Friday night I had a blast not only meeting Laini Taylor but other San Francisco Bay Area bloggers - the awesome Jess of Confessions of a Book Hoarder, fashionable Nancy of A Lush Budget Production Tales of a Ravenous Reader, and ingeniously named Stephanie of Maybe Genius (soon to be published author of a YA steampunk novel!). Books, great company and the chocolate cafe afterwards - nope, it could not have been more perfect! Oh, wait, it can - Copperfield's Books handed out hamsa temporary tattoos and feathered masks!





It turns out Laini once lived in the town I grew up in and currently reside, as well as attended the local junior college so the book signing was a homecoming of sorts. I'm trying hard to remember if I've ever run into her but I don't recall a pink-haired girl around these parts :)




She wrote Daughter of Smoke and Bone while "cheating" on another book. She had just written Lips Touch Three Times and was hard at work on a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic novel set in another planet, with ballerinas. Not kidding. She was struggling with it when she was struck with what she called "a slutty new idea." Out of nowhere came a scene of a blue-haired girl talking to her father, who happens to be a monster. This scene was the most fun she's ever had writing.



For those of you have read the book - it's the scene with "inessential penises." For those of you who haven't read it, you'll just have to find out for yourself what that's about. Laini read this scene out loud and afterwards commented that that line is the most quoted from the book.

Having indulged herself with this fling, Laini went back to the other book and finished it out of a sense of duty. ("The difference between published writers and not published - published writers have learned how to finish a book.") She has never looked at it since and immediately went to work on Daughter of Smoke and Bone. With only the first 1/3 completed (which took her 1 1/2 years to write), the agent sold her book. She wrote the rest in 3-4 months. She plans on finishing the sequel by the end of the year to be published next September.


If you've read Lips Touch Three Times, then you'll know about Kizzy. Laini says that she was the most like Kizzy at that age, 17 or so - hungry for love and attention. And that blue-haired, tattooed, kick-ass Karou is who Kizzy wished she were.

Now that the book's come out, she's received the strangest gifts: jawbone earrings from her husband,a necklace of teeth from a fan.

My one question for Laini: If the Poison Kitchen in Prague was based on a real place. Nope. Totally made up. I breathed a sigh of relief on this one because having been to Prague, I would be kicking myself till Tuesday if I had missed a place this cool and bizarre on my trip.





To round off my weekend of Daughter of Smoke and Bone, my Halloween costume inspired by the book.



"Don't squander yourself, child. Wait for love."