As soon as Meg Cabot wrote the last line of her thirteenth and final book in the Princess Diaries series, she was filled with regret.
'Ending it sucked for me ... so now I'm having second thoughts,' the author admits. 'I'm thinking Princess Diaries: College Years!'
Unbelievably bubbly for a woman who had just stepped off a sleepless flight from South Africa, Cabot was in Hong Kong as part of her first Asian book tour.
She may be daydreaming about her Princess Diaries postscript, but she says she has many other tasks to finish first: write the next instalment of her adult series, Airhead, promote her first children's series, Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls, continue her teenage series Mediator and her Heather Wells mystery series, and tackle an executive producer role for a Hollywood movie based on the Mediator books.
To describe her as 'busy' would be an understatement.
Luckily, Cabot appears to have the energy of a teenager - and she admits she acts like one too. At 41, the author from the American mid-west still follows teen series Gossip Girl religiously, bops her head to Rihanna and peppers her conversation with teenaged vocab: she told a movie producer to 'shut UP!' after he phoned to say a movie was being made of The Princess Diaries.
'I love teen stuff,' she says. 'I think it's because I had a bad experience growing up, so I never got to enjoy this kind of stuff.'