Ink Exchange Signing- RECAP

On May 5, 2008, Melissa Marr came to Books & Books and here's what happened:

Alright so the day started out pleasant, went to art class in the morning, turned in my first piece for the series, got an A. Then, my friends noticed my tattoos (despite my long sleeves mind you) and they were slightly faded. So Alex to it upon herself to, instead of paint, take up the entire class to touch up tattoos. Oh no it doesn't matter that my arm was going numb from the twisted motions I needed for her to reach the underside of my arm. She HAD to make it perfect. We got a couple of weird stares (just a few).

World History was pretty boring, again tattoos slightly showed so I had 3 people fondling my arm trying to raise my sleeves high enough to see the whole thing.

Slept the rest of the day in school.

So I take the metro to the mall to get picked up by Erika, but her text made it seem like she was there, but then I found out she wasn't so I was just confused for the most part. (I thought I made it clear we were on our way...) Bought my shirt for Friday's signing and then we left to Coral Gables. So we get to Books & Books and we head to Miracle Mile to go have I guess late lunch snack thing. Julie being sick wanted soup. So it was just basically us trying to find something everyone wanted. This sandwich place had like 20 jars of Mayo in the kitchen..a little gross. (I'm the one who first noticed this oddity) So, we ended up eating at Chicken Kitchen, -yay Cuban food-. Though when we walked in, there was a strange odor in the restaurant, (it was horrible!) it went away when we sat down though so that's a good thing. Uneventful late lunch snack thing. We went back to Books & Books to change into our fey attire. There were some little kids in the room picking up copies of Twilight, I don't know, the fact that we were talking about it's immense popularity 15 minutes before that, made me laugh. Anyway, so we go though our usual change in the bathroom, spend 20 minutes in front of the mirror trying to pin everything so it looks fine and taking pictures from the mirror...they all came out blurry this time. I had this eyeliner thing that one one end had green glitter, So I started drawing green swirls on Julie and Erika's faces. Though she was just pretending to see the sparkles. Yeah, they weren't really there... But don't our fey costumes look amazing?:

So we were leaving the bathroom and Erika closed the door on Julie's fingers, it wasn't her fault though, according to her XD. -cue in laughter- (It wasn't my fault! Why were her fingers near the door hinge in the first place?) I don't know how she managed not to scream. But it peeled off a bit of skin too, so I was off to the rescue to find some ice. The guys in the cafe were like...what did she do? "Closed the door on her fingers...." so he gave a towel filled with ice. So after running back to Julie with ice, one of the employees asked us if we were here for the signing. We told him that we were, but we were waiting for Emily. He then said that she was outside having tea. So I'm thinking...wait I would have noticed Emily, so we walk outside and notice it was Melissa who was there. (I had heard him say Melissa...) So we walk up to her and Jeannine to introduce ourselves. We were going to just add more chairs to their table but she just moved to one with us in it to chat. Melissa complimented our outfits and we just talked for a bit. Then, Meg and David appeared, meaning, the party got started. They started talking about some random things from the Wicked Lovely forums, which Meg kind of sort of forced us to join, or that was at least her undertone. We sat around laughing for a while just talking. Oh yeah, Melissa brought a Rath & Ruins shirt for Meg, and then she gave us Ink Exchange tattoo's designed by her tattoo artist Paul. While trying to explain to Melissa what parts of Florida were where, we somehow turned silverware into Florida. We also turned it into a corral while she explained a signing experience she had, but we have no pictures of that. She also showed us the Vine & Muse tattoos she had. She had a third but I can't remember what the last one was. Oh well.

A bit after that Emily showed up in snazzy lilac pants as a Winter Court Fairy. More spazzing from Meg. Emily brought us shirts that Melissa's editor had sent. They were made of awesome since they had the same design as the tattoos. Then Jeannine started taking pictures of our little group before we went inside for the main event.

I walked in expecting so see this huge crowd of people, kinda like in the Libba & Shannon signing. There was this one girl and her mom. So we basically just kept talking as we were outside..only inside. There isn't much I can say about this though since it was just Meg asking spoiler questions about the upcoming books. That I can't repeat. I can say that Melissa described how she developed the style WL is written in, and I actually thought it was pretty neat. She told us of Irish folklore and how it affected her writing. She also said many more things that I cannot repeat. Though now I'm left slightly saddened by the fact that if I HAD finished by Monday I could have asked Melissa about Irial and what becomes of him. Which I want to know. BADLY. So by eight the five of us had gotten our books signed. My mom kept texting me that they were almost here. So we asked Meg to get a picture of us with Melissa with my camera before I left. A few more texts from my mom, and I had to basically run from the store waving bye to everyone. Kinda knocked out asleep in the car.

-Lorena (With comments by Erika in blue)