Illuminae Book Launch - Event Recap!

This Friday, I was lucky enough to attend a book event in my area (a very rare thing) - The Illuminae Book Launch.  In case you haven't heard, Illuminae is a book co-written by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (both Melbourne authors - yay!).  It's a YA sci-fi written in different documents - for example, emails.  If you want to know more, check out the book's Goodreads page (linked above).  I'd heard nothing but spectacular things about this book, so I was super excited to be able to attend this event and get myself a copy of the book.

The event was at 6.30pm, so Mum and I decided to go into the city a little earlier to do some shopping.  We were halfway to the bus stop when I realised that I had forgotten the tickets...

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Oops.  Fortunately, Dad was able to drop us off at another bus stop, so we could catch that bus instead after I picked up the tickets.

Now, I've had some weird bus experiences - like drivers stopping to take phone calls, and people running on to punch another passenger - but I think this driver topped all of them.  We were driving along (bumpily), when suddenly the bus pulled over, not at a bus stop.  The driver got out and walked around to the front of the bus.  Then, we hear this banging noise, as though something was hitting the bus.  Turns out, it was the driver.  He walked back around shaking his hand - he must have hurt it.  Then he walked to the back of the bus, looking for something.  He came back around to the front again, and this time he had a lump of concrete in his hands.  Then, he started banging it on the side of the bus again.  What he was hoping to achieve, I have no idea.  Soon enough, he gave up and threw the concrete to the side of the road.  Then he got back in the drivers seat and we were off again.  Luckily, we made it just in time for the train that would take us the rest of the way to the city.

When we got to the city, we scoped out the event venue - Dymocks Melbourne - and did some shopping as planned.  We returned to the venue a half hour early.  There was literally one other person already there.  Oh, and we never actually needed the tickets.  At all.  Anyway, before I show you some photos, I need to warn you: I am not a photographer and my experience with editing photos is pretty much limited to iPhoto.  Here's one from before all the people got there.

You can see all the Illuminae posters around the room, and the stack of books on the table (to the right).  You can also see the one person who was there before me reading Queen of Shadow by Sarah J Maas (also to the right).  Unfortunately, I'm hopelessly bad at socialising, so I never mentioned it.

Once it got closer to six thirty, waiters started bringing around plates of food.  We got some cheese and biscuits put on the table in front of us.

You can also see the tiny stage which later would be completely obscured from my view and where the authors would give thank you speeches, and that a lot more people had arrived.  After they said their thank you's, they walked up the stairs a little and talked a bit more.

I think this photo gives you a pretty good idea of how busy it was, and how fantastically bad my short-person view of the authors talking was :P

Next, we all queued up to wait so we could get our books signed.  It just so happened that where we sat turned out to be furthest away from where the signing was taking place, so we were lined up for a long time - over an hour.  Here's a few photos from when we got to the front.

As you can see, I have blurred my face out of the last photo.  This is because I looked like a terrified tomato (no joke), and I don't think you needed to see that.  The authors were both super nice and even apologised for the long wait my mum and I had to endure.  You can also see here that Jay Kristoff is wearing a Bring Me The Horizon shirt and Amie Kaufman is wearing a Deathly Hallows necklace - both very cool in my view.

After the signing, we went to go get some dinner and then came back home.

Have you ever been to a book signing, and were you lucky enough to get an ARC of Illuminae?