Signing of the Times

With just about a day left for people to place their orders for Corax: Soulforge, you’ll be happy to know that the promise of individually-signed copies has now been fulfilled…

A lovely red. Some are blue, others black. (Got through 4 pens…)

Now, I’m fortunate that my scribble is, as those who have brought stuff to be signed in person will know, pretty quick. I feel for other authors with more complicated autographs. My first signing was at Games Day ’94 (or possibly Golden Demon, they had their own events back then). I used my standard signature, and by the end of the day signing Citadel Journals, White Dwarfs and assorted other things I could barely use my hand. At the next event I came up with the hasty ‘Gav’ motif seen above, and the day passed without terrible hand cramps. I’m not sure why the squiggly question mark thingy seemed like a good idea, but I felt that simply writing GAV in bad capitals didn’t quite fit the bill.

And this is what 8,000 cover sheets look like.

Each autograph only takes a couple of seconds, with four sheets per page and another few seconds to move it out of the way for the next one. Let’s say 15 seconds per page. Two thousand pages comes in at 30,000 seconds, which is about 500 minutes, or roughly eight hours twenty minutes. I broke the task into five sessions over four days. Unfortunately, it’s the sort of task you cannot simply turn off your brain (at points you do start to forget how to write your own name, most of it is by muscle memory) and so can’t really focus on anything else, so that’s eight hours of daytime TV I will try to repress for the rest of my life.

Let’s hope that it was worth it and a good number of them go out to good homes. Of course, if you get a copy, please bring it along to an event and I’d be happy to add a more personal dedication.