Meeting a favorite author

Information you didn't need

I have not. I do not celebrity worship but there is one person in the world that I'd ask to sign my tits: Clive Barker.

Robert Downey Jr.? Pass. Quentin Tarantino? Pass. Clive Barker? I'd cry if left alone with him, sobbing while asking him to paint me like one of his French girls. Maybe some day... *far off look*

I had a fantastic conversation with Christopher Moore the very day I got my first rejection. He was in town for a talk and a signing, and I'd just gotten that big fat R a few hours before. When I finally got through the line (I was second to last), I told him I was still stinging and what should I do? He, in Christopher Moore fashion, made a big pantomime of various forms of self-torment, then basically said, "Keep writing and keep trying." It made a difficult day into an enjoyable memory, for which I will always be grateful.

I met a bunch of them at RWA!

My girlfriend went to grad school at Ball State in Indiana. One night she got a random invitation from her prof to go to dinner with a special visitor to the unversity. She'd never heard of the guy but went and had a pleasant dinner with some obscure, struggling, elderly unknown writer named Kurt Vonnegut.

I burn with envy.

I have and it was everything I could have imagined, and more.

In the 1970's to about 2000, I read everything a certain gunwriter produced, his name was/is Jim Taylor. He wrote a few books but mostly contributed to magazines I subscribed to. About 10 years ago, I heard he was going to be flying to our PNW Sixshooters get-together, that year held in eastern Oregon. We would camp out in the mountains, talk, eat, shoot, eat, eat, shoot, talk, eat, etc.

He was already there when I arrived and he was everything I had imagined. Having grown up on horseback in southern Arizona on a working ranch, he was tall, rangy, with a face of leather and grip of steel. And every bit as nice as his articles and books would have lead you to believe.

The best part? In front of a dozen or more strangers, he put on a sixgun clinic that was incredible. He did things I had/have never attempted to do with mostly a Ruger .45 SA he had owned since a teenager, some half century earlier. In his mid 60s, none of us had any doubt Jim was the real deal. While I am an award winning handgun hunter, he left me in awe of both his ability and graciousness.

mrsmig said:

I sat googly-eyed in the lobby of a performing arts center and watched as Neil Gaiman, who was the evening's featured speaker, arrived, was greeted and then whisked away to dinner. I was an early arrival for another event in the building, and the lobby was almost empty. It would have been easy to approach him, and I'm sure he would have been lovely and gracious, but I just sat there rigid with shyness and awe (and I'm not generally a shy person). I got a front-row seat for his talk, and that was enough.

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I had the chance to talk with Neil very briefly a number of years ago, when he gave a talk and reading at our (once great, now sadly defunct) literary festival. Lovely man.

I met Terry Pratchett when I was 14. He came to my school (which was pretty close to where he lived) and I interviewed him for a magazine published by a cohort of county libraries. It was my first piece of published writing, he was just as funny as you'd imagine, and my mum turned up at 8pm convinced I'd been abducted and was dead in a ditch because I wasn't home yet

I will be getting some of my work blue-penciled by one of my faves - Robert J Sawyer - this October at the Surrey Writer's Conference. Should be interesting.

I missed going to Denver Comic-Con a few weeks ago, didn't think of it until I discovered my favorite author, Terry Brooks, had set up shop to autograph and meet his fans. I could've given him a copy of my book, had him autograph a copy of his, got a photo...

*bangs head against wall*