Chatting with Gene Luen Yang

My current Facebook status: Starr is SQUEE! She just got to chat with Gene Luen Yang while getting her copy of "American Born Chinese" autographed.

We ended up, I realized, talking about homemade tamales and how my family was probably the whitest family who ever had a Christmas tradition of making authentic tamales. I think this came somehow out of my telling Gene I was born in CA (he's from Oakland) and first read his book there... and then something about only being able to live in states without winter and with authentic Mexican food.

Man, I can babble. (Shudder.)

It was awesome, though--he's easy to talk to, and I got to tell him what I really wanted, which was how glad and impressed I was that his faith shows through in this book. I kept thinking, while reading it, "Is he saying...? That seems like a Christian theme..." --the dedication of his book gave another clue, and then his website shows more of his Catholic comics and the fact that he teaches at a Catholic high school. (I also asked him how he manages teaching and writing comics--he said it's particularly hard right now, and he's going to be teaching just part-time next year. Kudos for him! Yay for making a living off of art!!)

This makes up for all the other authors that I've missed autographing at TLA and ALA conferences. Plus, I think this is the first comic I've ever had autographed... haven't had that many books autographed, actually. It's been, ahem, mostly action figures. Of Star Wars characters. But then, I've been going to scifi conventions longer than I've been going to library conferences.

Now, if I could just get one of my Gaiman books autographed... I'd pick Death: The High Cost of Living, for sure. Oh wait, Stardust. Dangit.

Er... and I'm actually doing quite a bit of blogging, and soon should have a whole load of TLA photos up on my Flickr page--it's just all at the TLA blog at the moment. I'll probably update those links here next week--I'm primarily linking to content that I post on my wiki, anyway.