Ashley Poston's Heart of Iron NYC Launch Event Recap

I went to my first and only author signing of February. Thank goodness! I think I went to five author events in January, and that was just madness! I’m very glad that February was a nice quiet month with only the one signing.

The event I went to was Ashley Poston’s Heart of Iron launch event at Books of Wonder in NYC. Melissa Gray, author of The Girl at Midnight series, was also there to help ask Ashley questions. Together, these two were super fun.

Ashley (left) and Melissa (right)

While Ashley got a little emotional at first, she got managed to “tough it out” (I’m putting the phrase in quotes because it was perfectly understandable why she was emotional. It was her book baby’s birthday!) for the panel. Melissa asked Ashley all kinds of questions, like if the robot in Heart of Iron was similar to BB8 or R2D2, as all three characters beep a lot and act like loyal companions. And yes, Ashley did discuss how similar they were.

Ashley also talked about her character names, and how she came up with them. While I don’t remember much of her discussion for this, I do know she stole the name Robb from Game of Thrones’s Robb Stark. Melissa, like any good host does, had Ashley sort her characters into Hogwarts houses. Ana would be a Gryffindor, and D09 the android would be a Hufflepuff—she specifically said he was the huffliest Hufflepuff to ever Hufflepuff.

More tidbits of info: Ashley actually wrote Heart of Iron before she wrote her other book, Geekerella, even though Geekerella was released first. Melissa’s cover designer is the same cover designer who did the Grisha trilogy covers and Heart of Iron’s designer is the same one who designed Red Queen’s cover. How cool is that?

Oh, Ashley also has written/is writing (she never said she stopped) Jack + Elsa and Yu-Gi-Oh! fanfiction. Ashley also had a lot of opinions on Anastasia/Fox being acquired by Disney. She wasn’t thrilled about it because she doesn’t really want Anastasia to belong to Disney when the creator of the movie was fired from the company. She also doesn’t really love the Broadway play of Anastasia because they took out Rasputin and replaced him, the villain of the story, with communism. Weird.

Well, those are a just the things I remembered from the event. Although, I did forget to mention how there were cupcakes. I nabbed one right before the event started, after my roommate and I had stuffed McDonald’s down our mouths on the walk to the bookstore. (We were hungry, but we had a limited amount of time to walk to the store before the panel started.)

Once the signing started, I signed Ashley’s personal copy of Heart of Iron—she had every attendee sign it. I wrote “Yay for space books!” and signed my name. I also grabbed some character cards. They’re so cool!

After my roommate got her book signed, we left Books of Wonder. Thankfully, I left before purchasing any more books. Yay for restraint!