Alright folks, this is a pretty long one:
Saturday’s Signing at Borderlands Books in San Francisco.
I was pretty excited. This was my first book signing event and the first time I would get to meet Brandon and Harriet. After reading a number of Leigh’s Jordancon posts, Terez’s interview transcripts and some of the fellow tor.com rereader’s reports, I admit that my expectations were high.
Let me first say that Borderlands is an incredible SFF bookstore. The selection was impressive and the staff were incredibly friendly. If this store were in the East Bay, I’d probably go there often. The bookstore has an attached café right “next door” and it was there that the book signing with Brandon and Harriet was scheduled to occur.
However, Borderland’s café was not the largest of places and there were at least 150 people who were there for the signing, so they set up an “overflow room” in the actual bookstore itself. The overflow room section was not within line of sight of where Harriet and Brandon were set up; and although the individuals who were gathered there could hear Harriet and Brandon, they could not see them and vice versa. Brandon and Harriet would therefore be only able to answer questions from the folks in the café (which had about 50-75 folks, I’d estimate). However, there was a sound system that would pipe in all of Brandon and Harriet’s comments.
The Memory Keepers were spread between both rooms, and the MKs in the overflow room were providing Wetlander’s excellent crossword puzzle to help pass the time. They would occasionally engage in trivia as well. I respected the dedication of the Memory Keepers, but after reading about the MKs at some of the other signings, I’d say that maybe half of the group were on par with those examples. I did win a WoT swag bag answering some trivia. But the audience had to provide possible trivia questions on occasion, or verify whether certain trivia questions were accurate (no, the Third Age did not end after Book 10), or even keep some kind of interaction between the MKs and the audience going through some of the dead periods.
My plan to get there incredibly early was thwarted by Real Life, and so I was only able to get there an hour early. Unfortunately, that meant all of the spaces were taken in the main room and I found myself in the overflow room. Which was cool, but I was therefore unable to ask Harriet and Brandon questions. I had my audio recorder, but the side conversations of my neighbors tended to blend in with the piped in words of Brandon and Harriet, so I had to take notes.
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