After a great weekend, I’m back home and ready to blog!
Let’s get the biggest part of the weekend out of the way. At SpoCon 2012, I met Peter S. Beagle! I even enlisted a random boy by the elevator to take a photo:
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| You are looking at one of the highlights of my life so far. (And check out that awesome shirt!) |
A bit of background on this moment… I glanced around for a person to take the photo, I told Mr. Beagle, “I’m sure you get this all the time, but The Last Unicorn has meant so much to me…”
And it was right about then that I started to cry.
I mean, I wasn’t sobbing or anything. But my voice sort of cracked, and I could feel myself working up toward crying. I apologized and tried to get control of myself.
It was the strangest thing! I really didn’t expect to get emotional like that, not for any author or celebrity. Going in, I knew I’d be excited and nervous—but all of a sudden, there I was, standing right next to the person who had done so much for me. The Last Unicorn was a huge part of my childhood; to this day, I have whole chunks of it memorized. The novel is a daily inspiration to me. All those feelings (gratitude, especially) just welled up in me all at once. In that moment, I realized there was no way I could express all the ways he’d helped me, the ways he’d affected me. There was no way to properly thank him. And that’s when I started getting emotional.
He was so nice about it. He told me that my words were a fulfillment of a dream of his, one that he’d had since he was fifteen years old—which, of course, only made it more difficult for me not to cry. But as he told me a lovely little anecdote about when he met a certain writer he admired and devolved “into a fourteen-year-old fanboy,” I got a hold of myself, and we took the picture.
Like I said–a highlight of my life so far.
The next day, I had the opportunity to go to a screening of The Last Unicorn, where Mr. Beagle himself gave commentary. It took all my self control not to melt into a puddle of goo. What an amazing experience!
Later that afternoon, I stopped by Mr. Beagle’s table in the vendors’ hall and asked him to sign my books (and DVD sleeve). He did—and he remembered my name from the night before! (He actually said, “It’s Kaye, right? With an ‘E’? That’s what I thought it was.”) I almost died of happiness, but you’ll all be proud to know that I did not cry that time.
(I’ll update this post with some photos of my beautiful, beautiful signed books and DVD sleeve.)
Up Next: SpoCon 2012: Part Two! (This is where I’ll blog about some really wonderful folks.)
Kaye Thornbrugh 
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I'm jealous! I couldn't make SpoCon this year. Thanks for the window into what I missed. Really. No sarcasm. Seriously.
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