The Hay Festival – Meeting Sarah J Maas

It was this weekend when my co-blogger and I took a spontaneous trip to the ‘Hay Festival’ in Hay-On-Wye not only to experience the festival itself but to also meet one of my favourite authors, Sarah J Maas!!! For those who don’t know what the Hay festival is a literacy festival which celebrates great writing from poets, lyricists, comedians, novelists and the power of great ideas to transform our way of thinking. For 10 days in May, The Hay Festival is full of stories, ideas, laughter, and music.

For those interested the Hay Festival is running from 21st – 31st May 2015 and for more information check out the website here!

The Book Talk

For both of us, the talk was a great experience as we were able to not only find out more about her wonderful characters but her writing process and her journey to becoming an author. As expected she was such a lovely, down to earth person who made us laugh as well as inspiring us! I loved the fact she too was a fangirl like her readers and kept making ‘Lord of The Rings’ and ‘Jurassic Park’ references which too made me fangirl!

Sarah is such a passionate writer and her love for her books and characters are really inspiring! I loved hearing about her journey to becoming a writer and that numerous people had tried to discourage the idea of writing as a profession but she made it clear never to give up and just to block out the haters. To her, writing was a way with coping with difficult situations and something she turned to in times of need which I thought truly showed her love for writing! She said the best moment in her career was getting that call saying she was a New York Times Best Selling Author!!

The main topic of the book talk was her new release ‘A Court Of Thorns and Roses’ which I had not yet read but I loved finding out more about the characters. Learning more about the characters was really interesting and I can’t wait to start reading it!! She talked a lot about Feyre the protagonist and her characteristics and how she thought it was important for her to have the passion for art as well as being illiterate! She also made it clear how important it was for her to have a strong female protagonist which I too find very important!

Again she briefly talked about the sequel to ‘A Court Of Thorns and Roses’ and how it will be about the aftermath of the events in the first book! And you’ll also be pleased to hear that in the second book there are more gorgeous shirtless men!!

The thing I loved the most is the fact that she talks about her characters as if they are real and sitting in the audience next to her which I loved and showed she had as much passion for her characters as we as the readers do! I loved it!! We also talked about the Throne of Glass series and that she too cried when writing ‘Heir of Fire’ so much that it almost broke her! Authors aren’t as cruel as we thought!

Again I loved hearing about her writing process and when writing she tends to listen to films scores which I thought was fab as I do the same! However recently she said she had been listening to Kayne West when writing ‘Queen of Shadows’ to help get into the character of Celaena which is certainly very different!

Being able to meet one of my idols was absolutely amazing and an experience I certainly will never forget! I will treasure my signed copy of ‘A Court Of Thorns and Roses’ forever!! And to top my day off Sarah J Mass has just retweeted and replied to my tweet!! (I am currently fangirling!!)