So, last week was a little rough for me and I decided fuck it, gonna take some stress out of my life by just not working on posts and instead enjoying my evening by watching and reading (not that I ended up doing a ton of either, stress does weird things to your mind, but I am much closer to being caught up with the season now!). Heck I didn't even get a post on OASG up this week, although I don't think I ever linked to my Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru (And So The Town Moves) review.
Staying on #brand, the only posts I've put up in the past few weeks have all been anime-related actually, I talked about the excellent Miss Hokusai, the infectious Haikyuu!! Season 2, and the "the director thought that reading the source material was compromising his ability to tell a good adaptation" Utawarerumono: The False Faces (so, Underwaterrayromano 2). But there's been more to my life than just anime! In fact, part of the reason I had a hard time catching up with posts last week was because I was occupied Tuesday night by going to the launch of Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven King (the final book in the 100% metaphor, 100% real YA series The Raven Cycle) and I don't regret spending an entire evening there!
This was at a small store called Hurray For Books! and as I was walking down I saw a gaggle of ladies slightly older than me enter the door and then stop, not as if they went to the wrong place but as if there just wasn't room to keep moving. And boy howdy was it PACKED, I had planned to spend a little bit of time looking around but there wasn't a lot of room to move honestly, I gave up actually seeing Stiefvater at all and instead camped in the back with a few other folks who decided that we might as well sit down. I felt like I missed the point of several of her stories (I think the theme for the "baby that made me realize I need to stop doing portrait commissions" was "nature shakes her head" but I can't vouch for sure) but mostly just hearing the stories was pretty entertaining! I already knew that she didn't set fellow YA author John Green on fire when he challenged her to a car race (I didn't know that he started his car fire by pushing both the brakes and the accelerator at the same time when going around a curve, noooooo) and the story of how she accidentally posted her boobs on twitter was totally new to me (I thought the best part was her worrying that the official Scholastic YA account would RT the tweet because then oh dear, that's not PG-13).
There was lots of energy at the even overall, although I did have a small shock at just how white the crowd was. Folks, I live in DC (so, slightly north of this, the store was in Virginia) and that city is 50% black and a lot of that 50% white is Hispanic, being in an all-white crowd is downright weird since I know it's not what the area is like. I did note that most of the people were women (expected) and that they fell into two groups, the larger one being late high school/very early college (with a proclivity towards pixie cuts and every so slightly goth clothing) and a smaller group of women who looked a little older than me (so, middle to late 20s, hey I only said they looked older). There were so many people that the bookstore had set up an order to the signing line by name and I decided that thanks but no thanks, I already had a signed copy of TRK coming (I ordered from a store where she signed and doodled in it) so even though I had brought a book along I instead just slipped out and headed home. I was a little disappointed that for once I remembered to think of a good author question and there was simply no way a short girl in the back could be noticed for a question (so I didn't try, also I stood so much at work I didn't want to stand anymore) and I also regretted that I couldn't sign the car cover she brought for the readers to sign but again, lots of people, diiiidn't feel like pushing my way through all of them.
But I was happy at how it went, I mean heck that wasn't even the most crowded situation I had been in that week already (Monday morning, metro caught fire for the third time in three days and with single tracking each train was PACKED). But I'm still gonna hope the next author signing I go to has a few more seats.
