Recap: Victoria Aveyard's St. Louis Tour Stop

I've been pretty picky about which author events to attend lately. Mostly because a two-hour drive, on top of the $40 for the book and ticket price, are all just too much to commit to more than once or twice a year, especially with me attending ApollyCon annually as well. Not to mention my terrible habit of buying too many books in general. So, I only go to author events that I'm really, really interested in. Victoria Aveyard is one of those authors who made the cut. She visited my area for her St. Louis Tempest tour stop, and I decided to go.

 

I got to the St. Louis County Library space around 6:15 p.m., where I chilled until the event started at 7 p.m. I thought I'd been to the event space before for another Victoria Aveyard signing (along with many other signings) back in the day, but the space was a lot bigger and more modern than what I remembered, so maybe it wasn't the same space...? Or they did some major upgrades since. It had probably been 10 years since I'd attended an author event in that area. But anyway, when I got there, I picked up my pre-signed copy of Tempest, and I got a card with my signing group number on it. I was in Group 4. I'm a little confused about how that happened, as I was fairly early. I should have been 2 or 3, so maybe I went to the wrong side of the table and the lady I got my book from had the higher signing numbers. But, it didn't matter in the end. The signing line went pretty fast. Oh, and before the panel began, I got to see Jessica from A Great Read! That was cool to see her face-to-face after talking online so much.

 

Victoria's podcast co-host and fellow author friend Soman Chainani was the host for the conversation at the St. Louis tour stop. They were both pretty funny together. Unfortunately, my camera did not like the lighting, so my pics are the lovely quality you can see here. The yellow tone just doesn't mix with my phone. I did get a good pic before they dimmed the lights, though, but no one was sitting in the chairs then. XD 

  

 

Soman and Victoria apparently recorded the entire conversation so it could later be posted on their podcast, Plot Twist, which is kind of cool. Now, I'll always be able to go back and listen to it and remember the time I saw them in person. They talked about Victoria hitting the NYT bestseller list, since it was the second Wednesday after her book released. They also discussed how Tempest was originally supposed to be a standalone but was too big, so it had to be revised into a duology. It was also supposed to originally be a sub-plot of another project Victoria was working on, but she thought it would work better as its own story.

After the panel, I waited about 30 minutes to get my books signed. I'd brought eight total since the last time I'd since Victoria was when Glass Sword had been released and she was signing with Sophie Jordan. That was when I was still in college! I had two tote bags full of books, as Victoria's are all 300+ pages. Some are more like 500+. I took the collector's editions of the first two Red Queen books, the last three books in the Red Queen series, and all three Realm Breaker series hardcovers. We were only allowed to get one book personalized, so I chose King's Cage. Victoria even mentioned that I'd have to come back next year to get War Storm signed to complete the whole set. I think I gave her a weird look when she said that. My brain wasn't working, so it took me a minute to process what she said. Also, this sounds stupid, but she used hand sanitizer right before signing my second stack of books, so it made me a bit self-conscious about if my books (or just me in general) appeared dirty or something. I think she likely was just being proactive after signing so many things, but it caught me off guard to have it happen during the middle of my signing experience. I still smiled and said thank you, though. She was very nice. I'll just have to stop overanalyzing the sanitizer experience. Lol. 

 

 

 

They didn't do posed photos, just the signing line pics, so I have many photos of the back of my head. The one I have that's from the side has me looking a tad doofus-like, so I'll keep the one I share here to the back of my head. But overall, it was a good experience. I got to leave work two hours early, I ended up stopping at Barnes & Noble before the event started, and I got books signed. What more could I bookish girl ask for?