Meeting authors

I must say that meeting the authors of favorite books can be a great time.  I met several awesome people last year--Meg Cabot, Deborah Harkness, Laurie R. King, and several others at Bouchercon.  Cabot and King were the coolest, because I got to eat a meal with them (at separate times; together it would be an odd combination, since their writing styles are quite different).  And sitting in that big circle in the Renaissance Hotel lobby with all my FOL new friends was awesome too.

However, there are other times where you put your foot in your mouth and feel like a complete dolt, and someone like Daniel Handler totally takes advantage of that and even immortalizes your gaffe in your signing.  That's the other kind of meeting authors that isn't so great.  After a half hour or so presentation, the rest of the time of the Lemony Snicket and Jon Klassen author/illustrator visit was taken by book signing.  I was basically almost the end of the line, and since I was getting both to sign The Dark, I had to wait in 2 lines.  Klassen was nice and cute, and drew a picture of a car with his John Hancock.  By the time I finished with him, it was after 10 (program started at 7).

I did get to chat with a nice girl who was right behind me in line, and we liked a lot of the same things.  I wish I had got some contact info, cause we we both into Doctor Who, Veronica Mars, Joss Whedon, and other cool stuff.  Still, I was exhausted by the time I got to Handler, the official author representative for Snicket ;).  I tried to express my enjoyment for Mr. Snicket's books but it came out rather botched.  I completely embarrassed myself in front of all the people left.  And got it immortalized in my copy of The Dark, which is rather unfortunate.  Ha!

Mr. Handler's inscription reads: To Jessica, who ought to know better.

So that is my condensed version of what happened meeting Daniel Handler.  If you want to know the whole story, well, you are just going to have to ask me.