Chuck Palahniuk signing

Well, a couple weeks back I went to a book signing for Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. I waited to post about this because I got a picture taken by the girl behind me in line and was waiting on her to email it, but that hasn't happened so I will now recount the events.

I got to Borders for the signing about 6:15 and I am hella glad I got there when I did. The signing was to begin at 7 and since I hadn't heard any press about it, I assumed it would be slightly crowded but not too incredibly bad. I was wrong. When I walked in the door and purchased my copy of the book, Chuck was already signing. The line had snaked its way through the CDs, DVDs, gift books, and most of the smaller book sections and reached all the way to Childrens.

I got a white ticket to distinguish me from the pink tickets and stood in line. I can estimate that there were at least 200 people in line ahead of me and that is probably a lowball. At 7, Diana showed up and got to meet my new friends. Right behind me were three girls from Denton who had driven down to meet Chuck and as we had a long wait ahead of us, I struck up a conversation. I had hoped the line would zoom along, but Mr. Palahniuk decided to speak for 45 minutes so I had only moved about 50 feet in an hour and a half.

By the time we hit DVDs, it was time for dinner so I went to the cafe and got two teas and two chocolate chip cookies. This was the main course, as our appetizer consisted of a tin of Jelly Belly Jellybeans. My new friends and I started to get bored around 8 so we pulled out a piece of paper and started writing. That's right, we wrote. Each person would begin a short set of sentences and before they passed it on, they would hide what they wrote. The next author would then build off the last sentence written and at the end we would see what was produced. Interesting game if you ever need to kill some time.

All in all, I finally got my books signed at 10:50. You heard right folks. I was at Borders for 4 1/2 hours. The best part of the story. When I went to the bookstore a couple of days ago, I ran across almost all of the books I got signed on the shelf. All of them autographed.

Did I mention I stood next to Chuck Palahniuk?

Newt