I don't think it would surprise anyone who reads my blog or knows me to know that I hate Phoenix in the summer time. In general I don't go to Phoenix very often but I especially try to avoid it between April and September.
BUT this past Wednesday, Neil Gaiman(!) made a stop in Phoenix on his book tour, and of course, Jerbs and I agreed that a reading and signing with him was way worth the trip and the potential heat stroke. We actually found out about and bought tickets for this even way back in, like, February, so we'd been looking forward to it for quite awhile. (Plus I got to take a random day off work AND I got paid for it! First paid day off ever in my life).
Overall, it was a pretty quick trip. We got to Phoenix around lunch time and met up with a good friend of ours from college, B, and hung out with her for a bit. We had lunch and stopped at this awesome nail supply store that sells mostly to salons but is open to the public; they have high end polish for dirt cheap. I may have ended up leaving with 5 bottles of polish . . . it was awesome. (And also, B apparently reads this, so hi B!!) After that we stopped at a Barnes and Noble because I needed to buy something for the signing, since all of my books are still boxed up back in Kingman (which ended up being more depressing than expected as the book I really wanted to bring was out of stock at every B and N here and in Phoenix). I bought his new book, the one he's on tour for.
There was a MASSIVE amount of people at the signing. By the time we got to the high school where it was taking place there was already a gigantic line to get in. And we were there about 5 minutes before they even opened the doors. We were still able to get decent seats, though. The reading and Q/A portion were absolutely fantastic. My favorite part of these things (we've been to 2 tour events for him before) is the reading. Neil Gaiman is a fantastic reader, and when he's reading his own work, there is something about it that is just mesmerizing. Plus he's a genuinely kind and funny guy, so the Q/A session was very entertaining. My personal favorite was him telling the story about how his book Stardust was actually inspired/conceived in Tucson. I didn't know that, and it was cool to hear.
The signing part of things was less awesome. The way they did the signing was in alphabetically assigned groups; each ticket had a letter on it and that was the group you were in for the signing. Jerbs and I were Q. (Which actually wasn't so bad, considering that there were so many people there they'd actually gone through the alphabet once and had to start on double letters after, and the guy we were sitting next to had CC as his group). The signing started around 8, and the people running the event kept saying things were going to go really quickly and blah blah blah which . . . wasn't really the case. By 10 I was starting to panic a little, because I didn't want to get home super late and then have to work in the morning. At 10:45 Jerbs and I left, hit a drive thru for dinner, and came back. Finally at 11:30 they called Q and we got to get in line. We both got our books signed but they were really rushing things so neither of us got to talk to Neil or anything, which was disappointing.
Honestly, though (and I know this sounds creepy, probably) it's incredibly inspiring for me to just stand in his presence. Not in a stalker way, because I'm definitely not stalking him. It's more like an admiration thing. This is a man who is a truly great writer and storyteller, who does what I want to do--he writes beautiful things, and because of the things he writes, over a thousand people are willing to pile into an auditorium and wait hours on end for him to scribble his name on a book for them. It is truly amazing to me, and it makes me want to work on my own writing and hope that I can be a fraction as successful as him.
Anyway. By the time we got gas and got on the road it was after midnight. Then about 60 miles out of Flagstaff we hit some kind of construction (a blast zone, I think, because they're widening the road) and were literally just stopped for about 20 minutes. We finally got home at 2:45 AM, and I think we were both asleep by 3 AM.
Which made my alarm going off at 6:30 AM about the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Not really, but damn, it felt that way at the time! I don't even know how I survived work, but I do know that I drank 2 bottles of Starbucks frappuccino (they brought back the caramel flavor in the bottles!) and 2 cups of coffee from the pot at work, and came home too wound up to crash.
But it was worth it. Well worth it, both for getting to visit with an old friend and, of course, for Neil Gaiman.
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