As mentioned late last night, we did BART over into The City on Thursday morning, arriving at Stacey's Books at 11:30 for the 12:30
George R. R. Martin book signing. It was a good time to get there, since the signing was on the second floor of the large bookstore, and they had about 50 chairs set up. There were maybe 20 people there ahead of us, so I grabbed two seats in the middle while Malaya was downstairs buying
A Feast for Crows and two other older Martin books about which I know nothing. By noon all of the chairs were filled and at least 50 more people were lined up, and by the time he got there around 12:35, there were at least 150-200 people in the area, filling the side aisle, the center aisle, and several rows of books to the side. I couldn't get a good estimate since I was sitting in the middle with high stacks of books beside me, but it was a good sized-crowd.
Here's a pic from my cell phone cam from where we were sitting, in the fourth row, maybe 15 feet from the podium.
The guy on the right there has a Ice and Fire t-shirt on, with the Night Watch's pledge on the back. Fan boy sighting! There was at least one other guy there with a themed t-shirt, but they certainly weren't boys; Malaya and I were among the youngest people there, and she and a few other Asians were the only non-white people.
Martin was very cool. Not old in sound or look; it's the beard that makes him seem aged. He's a tiny little guy though, at least a head shorter than me, and very rotund. The size, coupled with his joking, witty mannerisms really make clear that the character in his series most like him is... Tyrion. Not that Martin's deformed or as vicious and hardened as the Imp, but he's short and he's the jester, a personality likely evolved as a defense mechanism, much as Tyrion's is in the series.
I'd never heard him speak before, and enjoyed it. He's funny, eager to self-deprecate (Tyrion again), witty, tells a good story, and gives thought-out, wordy answers to all sorts of questions. I'd have happily sat through a much longer Q&A session, but they kept it to about 30 minutes, and then the book signing stampede began.
Before we left the condo that morning, I called the bookstore (an impressive achievement, given that I'd gone to bed around 6:30am and gotten up at 10) and asked about their book signing policy. It turned out that, dire warnings on their website to the contrary, they did allow you to bring in your own books. You just had to buy one copy of the new one there to get your own signed, and they said they'd be checking receipts. At it turned out they did not check receipts, but we'd already bought a new hardcover Feast for Crows by then, and we wouldn't have been janky and picked up a new copy, had him sign it along with our other books, and then put the new one back on the shelf.
Martin's personal rule was that he'd sign three books per person per trip in line. So you could get more than three things signed, but you had to go to the back of the line and come through again. I didn't see anyone do that, or anyone with some ridiculous stack of books, but I wasn't watching the line that closely. I was a little disappointed that no one was in cosplay attire, but after all, it was a lunchtime signing in the business district of downtown SF. I imagine his evening signings have a bit more festive flair to them.
We did get three books signed, and he wrote a little personal message on them, along with his huge, looping signature. So we've got a signed US
Feast for Crows, a signed and personalized UK
Feast for Crows (the US version has a much more detailed map on the inside front, while the UK version is about an inch thicker, despite having approximately the same page count), and a signed and personalized (to me) copy of
Fevre Dream, an older novel of his about vampires. At least that's what Malaya said; I know nothing about it, though I'm obviously going to read it at some point.
Here's a shot of me with him. Tragically, Malaya's digicam came up short on this one, leaving it quite blurry, so I had to crop it and sharpen it to make it recognizable. Click the thumbnail if you want to see it full-sized, and apparently taken through a smear of Vaseline. I'd Photoshop in a torch with him passing it to me, but that would be a bit of a stretch, even given my love of sarcasm. Especially considering that he's still got 3 or 4 books to release in a fantasy series that looks likely to be the best ever written.
The niftiest news of the signing was new as of yesterday, and it was the fact that his publisher had called him yesterday to tell him that Feast for Crows was going to debut at #1 on the NYT Bestseller list. He was pretty tickled about it, if too modest to show it obviously. His previous best was #12 for Storm of Swords, the previous book in the series, way back in 2001. If there were any justice in the book buying world, book 4 would stay on top for a few months, while the three previous novels popped up on the list as well. Hell, Dan Brown's Angels and Demons and several of his other pot boilers did that when The DaVinci Code first hit so big, and A&D is blatantly the same book as DaVinci. Martin's are wildly different, even as they continue the same epic saga. He'll never sell a fraction as well as the Harry Potter series; Song of Ice and Fire is way too serious and adult and intelligent and dark, but at least he's having some richly-deserved success.
He didn't talk that much about the books, and most of the questions were general issue ones, rather than anything too detailed about the series, for which I was thankful. I was more interested in the process, and besides, I'm not letting myself read Feast for Crows until I finish my novel, a milestone I'm hoping to reach before 2006, so I really didn't want to hear any big spoilers at the talk. And I didn't.
The most interesting question was something to the effect of, "How are you able to be such an asshole to your characters?" I thought the question was more generally about how Martin created such interesting, alive, and sympathetic characters and then put them through such terrible ordeals, even to the point of killing them off unexpectedly. Martin answered it solely on the "killing them off" angle though, likely because he hears that a lot. (If you've not read the series, it's exceptionally wrenching in that numerous characters die, including major ones, including good guys you can't believe aren't going to triumph. Plenty of horrible characters die too, though, so don't think it's any more unfair than real life.)
Without going into specifics, he was clearly proud of his willingness to make his characters pay the ultimate price, and his metaphor was of a roller coaster. We all (well most) enjoy riding them, and they're thrilling and fun, but you know you're going to live. (I thought the punchline here was going to be an aside about how that wasn't always the case at smaller local fairs, but he did not go there.) He compared that sort of tame thrill to the fear people feel during war, or being held at gun point, or mugged, or whatever, and said that he tried to write the equivalent of real fear. You could pop him for being bold enough to compare his stories to the terror war veterans feel when they're actually being shot at, but I thought the metaphor was apt, and it's something I've long gripped about, if not in quite those terms.
After all, Hollywood films are the worst offenders, but lots of novels (and movies, and TV shows, and etc) do the rollercoaster thing, where there are some ups and downs, but you never really fear for the lives of the main characters, or the triumph of the good guys. They follow the formula religiously, with minor adventures leading up to a showdown, an apparent defeat for good, a stunning recovery, and the ultimate triumph. There may be a casualty or two on the good guys' side, but it's virtually never a main character, and you never doubt that good will win, in the end, no matter how bleak things look. It's far from original, but lots of readers and viewers enjoy that, and want the safety of knowing nothing too scary is going to happen, and that the story will tuck them comfortably back into bed in the end. Martin strives for just the opposite effect, and it's one of the things I really enjoy about his series and admire about his writing. And I just wish I had more main characters in my nearing-completion fantasy novel, so I could bump a few more of them off when the reader least expects it. Next time I'll write one with a bigger cast, to give me more leeway!
Seriously though, (I was being serious...) it's quite a challenge for the writer to do that, simply because you've got to make the characters interesting and you've got to have enough of them to keep the story going despite the death of principle actors. You almost have to do a series, to have time to introduce numerous characters, have them do things to make the reader interested in them, and then dispose of them anywhere before some huge grand finale.
One thing I did miss about the signing was internal. I didn't feel any huge boost of writing energy this time around, and I was kind of hoping I would. I did write some decent stuff tonight though, putting off this blog entry until very late/the last thing, which is at least partially why it's so disjointed and all over the place. I'll perhaps add another post about the signing later on Friday, when I'm more awake and my thoughts are organized. At this point I'm just hoping to see this publish without red X's for images, so I can get into bed. Three point five hours of sleep last night and an hour nap before Thursday evening kali class shouldn't have kept me going until 6am, and with Malaya out all day and evening tomorrow I'll have no excuse not to get substantial writing done. I'm even hoping to bang out my much-delayed BlizzCon-themed Decahedron, tomorrow in the day before I get going on the fiction.
