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Interview #915: AMOL Signing Report - Deslya, Entry #1
Deslya
Hello everyone! Below is the report and Q&A from the Salt Lake City Signing!
Feb 1, 2013 was a rare sunny winter day in Salt Lake City when we assembled at Weller Book Works to meet Brandon Sanderson and more than 150 of his amazing fans. Brandon has often shared that the owners of this bookstore were so supportive in his early years as an author, before most Wheel of Time fans even knew his name, that it was terrific to have such a large crowd, especially with the Jan. 8 Midnight Release Party in Provo having happened only about 45 minutes away from Salt Lake.
The gathering crowd included people of all ages young and old. There were even infants and children hanging out—future fans, their parents called them. Soon the seating section was overflowing, and people started staking out spots in the mezzanine, the stairs, anywhere that they could get a good view of the as yet empty lectern bearing a wonderfully large poster of the Memory of Light cover.
We Memory Keepers handed out a variety of games and trivia to entertain the fans while they waited (some almost three hours) for their chance to get their book signed. Memory Keeper Marc T. went around taking photos of the whole event, many of which are here, the rest are soon to be in the Gallery. We shared 4 different sets of trivia questions, a quote match and a crossword (thanks Wetlander!). We thought we’d made a good sampling of easy and tough questions, and we were right about the tough ones—as we didn’t see any (that I know of) completely correct answer sheets. But people tried and worked together and we gave them hints, and eventually we started seeing completed trivia come back. We gave out extra raffle tickets to anyone who turned in the sheets which meant some people ended up with lots of extra tickets for doing all that fun “work.”
The crowd was nice and thick even before the scheduled start time of 7pm, so Memory Keeper Deb N. went around with an activity she created. People pulled out a random slip of paper which contained their WoT “profession.” There were Gleemen and Aes Sedai, Atha’an Miere and Darkfriends—fans had a lot of fun finding out the role the Pattern wove for them.
Finally, after we Memory Keepers had a few private minutes with Brandon to get our own books signed, the man himself appeared to thunderous applause. He wore his signature leather jacket and looked surprisingly well rested considering he has a newborn at home! He jumped right in with the reading and Q&A which is included below as recorded by Memory Keeper Chris W.:
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