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Because the talk everywhere I go is of the US election¹ or of the general economic collapse I thought that I would share the rest of the YA writers’ fairies.

Holly Black: The coffee fairy—a fairy that would make sure I always find the most delicious cup of coffee (free-trade, with milk) wheresoever I am.

Cecil Castellucci: I’d like a fairy of perfect timing.

I mean that in every way, from timing everything perfectly, to everything being on time, to it being the right time for things, and to telling a good story/ joke with perfect timing.

Cassandra Clare: I have an umbrella fairy. Umbrella fairy tells me to take my umbrella, then it doesn’t rain. But I wish I had a typing fairy. Typing fairy could teach me to type with all fingers.

Jenny Davidson: My fairy is a sense of time fairy—I always know when it is, it is easy for me to be punctual and I have a good sense of how to pace a class (use of 75 mins) or a project (use of 3 months). But I wish I could trade it in for a sense of direction fairy! Because I can get lost at the drop of a hat, it is utterly absurd, I never know where I am or how to get anywhere, I am often finding myself (though less in age of Google Maps, where foresight can largely compensate for sense of direction) on the verge of tears and not at all sure which direction I’m pointing in!

Cory Doctorow: I wish I had an email answering fairy who knew exactly what I wanted to say to every email and took care of them all!

Cory really needs that fairy. I have seen how much email he gets: nine hundred bajillion katrillion pieces in a single day. It’s insane.

Maureen Johnson: Right now I wish I had a Book-Finishing Fairy. Or, at the very least, a That Section Clearly Adds Nothing to the Plot Fairy. Or a Make this Suck Less Fairy. Failing that, I would accept an Answer My E-Mail Fairy or a I Will Make You the Next Doctor on Doctor Who Fairy . . . because that last one sounds kind of fun.

Ellen Kushner: My fairy seems to be the Find Your Friends Fairy. I run into people I know on the street in foreign countries, in airports, and in restaurants.

David Levithan: I’ll go for a Wakefulness Fairy. You know, one who would whisper something really funny or (barring that) really loud in my ears whenever my eyelids started to flutter shut in the middle of the day.

E. Lockhart: I have a “finding things that belong to other people” fairy. If someone I live with has lost something, I can put my hands on it in a minute or two.

Sadly, my fairy won’t actually work for me. My postal scale went missing in my house 6 months ago and hasn’t turned up yet.

I wish for an anti-clutter fairy. Clutter is cluttering up my cluttered life.

Jaclyn Moriarty: I think I have the fairy of relentlessly excited expectations. Every time I hear an e-mail arrive, or the telephone ring, I think something amazing is about to happen. At the moment I have a letter by my front door, to remind myself to post it, but every time I walk by the door I notice it there and get a rush of excitement. I think: ‘Somebody has slipped a mystery letter under my door! How fantastic! Who could it be?!’

If there was a fairy that could meet my excited expectations, such as a fairy of
regular yet surprising news of good fortune, that would be my choice.

If not, I’d like the fairy of decisiveness.

Ooooh! I want a fairy of met expectations, too. Frabjous!

Sarah Mlynowski: I am a hypochondriac. So the fairy I wish I had is one who would point out germs. Such as: Sarah, do not eat that chicken! It is not well cooked and is riddled with salmonella. Or, Do not shake that guy’s hand, he just went to the bathroom and did not wash it. Or, Do not sit next to that girl on the subway because she will sneeze on you and give you Diphtheria.

I have a perky fairy. I can usually cheer friends up when they are depressed.

Garth Nix: I have a slightly warped Punctuality Fairy. He/She/It forces me to be on time, the twist being that if I am actually late, the Punctuality Fairy will make everyone else late too, or delay my plane, or cloud my mind so that I’ve thought the meeting is earlier than it should be, so that any meeting, engagement or booking that I would have been late for by the original schedule, suddenly becomes on time.

I have been asked many times over the years by Sydney’s State Rail to sell them my punctuality fairy so that all their late trains will suddenly become on time, but the fairy just won’t leave me. I’m hoping that HOW TO DITCH YOUR FAIRY will give me some ideas.

Diana Peterfreund: I think I have a hat wearing fairy. I tend to look good in hats, and I never lose, sit on, or have hats blow off my head. I also don’t get hat
head.

I don’t know if I feed her often enough, though.

John Scalzi: I did have a “know who is calling on the phone as soon as it rings” fairy for a while, which used to freak people out when I would pick up the phone and call them by their name without saying hello first. However, in the age of call waiting, this fairy has become far less useful than it was back in the day. Stupid advances in technology.

I wish I had a fairy that would make bacon double cheeseburgers a slimming health food. Because that would rock.

Robin Wasserman: My fairy is a last minute fairy, that lets me start anything at the last minute and still get it done on time. That works out rather nicely, but I suppose if I had my pick, I’d take a say the right thing fairy — which, as you might guess from the name, means that in any and every situation I’d always know exactly the right thing to say. (Perhaps this fairy would first have to kill the say the wrong thing fairy who often stops by for a visit.)

Scott Westerfeld: I have the simile fairy. Whenever I need a cool simile to nail a dramatic moment, my fairy comes and hits me on the head like a pillowcase full of naked mole rats. Or, if I come up with a lame one like that, I pick a book from the shelf and open it at random. And, lo and behold, there’s a great simile to steal right on that page. So it’s a simile-stealing fairy as well.

But I want a good-night’s-sleep fairy.

You can find more fairies here. And, as usual, feel free to share your own fairies.

I would like to wish everyone in the US over 18 a good voting fairy.

1. I’m in Canada! They have their own election! Why are we still talking about the US one? Um, because it’s really important?

Delia Sherman who wrote The Changeling, my favourite Middle Grade of 2006,¹ totally has the fairy she thinks she has. The idea for Ro’s fairy comes from watching Delia in action:

I suspect I have the shopping fairy. And I wish I had the plot fairy—it would be so much more useful in my professional life. Probably ain’t going to happen, though. Can you see me going for months and months, possibly years, without shopping? Me neither.

I won’t lie. I LONG for Delia’s fairy. I have seen her go to Filene’s Basement and Century 21 (giant department stores packed to the gills with people and stuff) and find the best clothes in the UNIVERSE. I go to those places and all I find are claustrophobic panic attacks.

I don’t need to explain who Libba Bray is or what she writes, do I? Just in case: She is the author of the Sweet & Terrible Beauty trilogy. Yes, she’s the one who [redacted] [redacted]. And her next book, Going Bovine, is EVEN BETTER. Here are the fairies she has and wants:

I think I have an Absurdist fairy, [Justine says: She so TOTALLY does!] one that both allows me to see the absurd in everything and that presents me with a fair amount of the wacky. It’s always a Fellini film in my head.

I wish I had either a metabolism fairy that allowed me to eat everything I want whenever I want and burn it all off whilst lounging around reading or a theoretical physics fairy that made it possible for me to understand everything inside Ed Witten’s brain while also grasping anything above third grade math.

John Scalzi, who can write anything at any length because he has verbal diarrhea² is a genius, desires a similar fairy to Libba:

I wish I had a fairy that would make bacon double cheeseburgers a slimming health food. Because that would rock.

But has a pretty useless one:

I did have a “know who is calling on the phone as soon as it rings” fairy for a while, which used to freak people out when I would pick up the phone and call them by their name without saying hello first. However, in the age of call waiting, this fairy has become far less useful than it was back in the day. Stupid advances in technology.

In case you’re wondering why Scalzi is telling you what his fairy is when he doesn’t actually write YA it’s because he DOES write YA. His latest, Zoe’s Tale is TOTALLY YA. And bloody good unputdownable YA at that. So, nyer!

Wow, there are a lot of fairies out there. When I started How To Ditch Your Fairy I had no idea how many there were. I spent days scratching my head struggling to come up with enough. How stupid was I? Don’t answer that.

You can find other fairies here. And feel free to keep sharing yours over here or in the comments to this post or on your own blog or wherever you want really. It’s all good.

1. Yes, in my world YA includes Middle Grade. Deal.
2. Hey, he always says I’m his favourite Australian when I happen to know I’m the ONLY Australian he knows.

Because you deserve it, some more YA author fairies for your delectation:

Penni Russon, author of the wondrous Undine trilogy, has a most useful fairy:

I have a voice recognition fairy - with her help I can always pick out celebrity voices in animations. As you might imagine this is a very useful skill and has served me well on numerous occasions.

I wish I had a zen master fairy to help with the parenting of the children.

Lauren Myracle, author of the amazing and terrifying Bliss, had this to say when I asked her what her fairy is:

My Starbucks fairy simply loves Starbucks and steers me toward one EVERY DAY, regardless of any opinion *I* might have on the matter. And makes me order mochas, which aren’t really coffee at all, and which do not have the benefits of wheatgrass.

Personally I would rather die than have that fairy. Coffee? *Shudder*

Alaya Johnson, author of the wonderful, Racing the Dark,¹ desires a much better fairy:

I’d like a cooking fairy. Specifically, I want one that specializes in making injera, because if there’s a way to cook that Ethiopian flatbread of unbelievable deliciousness without magical intervention, I’d like to know it. I have spent many hours in the kitchen, fermenting and stirring and scraping, and the best I’ve come up with resembles sour construction paste. Yuck!

I have also tried and failed to cook injera. Le sigh.

Click here to see other YA writers’ fairies.

If you want to tell me about your fairies and you’re in the Philadelphia or NYC area you can do so at the following events:

Wednesday, 24 September, 7:00PM
Big Blue Marble Bookstore
551 Carpenter Lane
Philadelphia, PA

Saturday, 27 September 2008, 1:00PM
Voracious Reader
1997 Palmer Ave
Larchmont, NY

For those NYCers who’ve been complaining that I’m not doing any events in the city, Larchmont is a mere twenty minutes away from Grand Central Station and the Voracious Reader is a mere five minutes from the station. Easy peasy.

Hope to meet some of you soon!

1. Hey, Alaya, when are we going to get the sequel?