News: Patricia Briggs Book Signing

Yesterday, Borderlands in San Francisco hosted a book signing for Patricia Briggs. I'm always looking for an excuse to go into the city, but it certainly helped that Briggs is one of the few authors I have on my radar. The two reasons combined were more than enough excuse to justify asking the evening off of work so I could drive on over with my husband in tow!

All-in-all, I came away from last night thinking that the experience of a book signing is incredible. Especially when an author cares about her fans like Briggs does.


About the hosting book shop:

Borderlands is a shop that specializes in fantasy and sci-fi books. Therefore, their selection for these genres is very good. The small shop, which seems to be made entirely out of wood from the floor to the shelving, is positively packed with books involving the fantastic.

About the book/author:

Briggs is promoting her book Bone Crossed. The book is the fourth in the Mercedes Thompson series, affectionately dubbed "the Mercy series" by fans. I read the entire book the day it was released (3 February 2009). The review, which will be posted early next week, will be very positive. The author was very pleasant. First, Briggs read a scene from Bone Crossed for roughly 10 minutes before taking questions from the crowd. Each individual's question was considered and answered candidly. Then, for the signing of each book, Briggs not only took personalized requests and asked what color the fan would like the signing done in, she then made conversation with each fan. Briggs definitely left me with the impression that she's an incredibly approachable woman with quite a talent for writing indeed!

Photos of the event:

Myself (right) with the author (left).


Briggs signing for fans.


Part of the crowd waiting to have books signed.


Lastly, I transcribed a few answers Briggs had for the questions she received during the Q&A session (Any errors are mine and a ellipses indicate a portion I edited out for reasons of readability):

[Briggs responding about errors in books.] My forum people came together and started a canon, if you go to my forum--go to patriciabriggs.com--go to my forum, and see this Mercy's world canon. They, bless their hearts, have gone through each of the characters, they've gone through things I have said about different kinds of creatures, and put it all down there for me. And I look at it quite often! Not always often enough, but I would have far more bloopers in my books if I didn't have that. They rock. They're awesome. [Briggs esponding to a question about the sensitivity required to portray a Native American in her books.] I grew up in Montana, so I'm very aware of this. In fact, I worked in a museum... At the time we were having a lot of issues, because they had a collection of old medicine artifacts and things like that they were trying very hard to de-acquisition and give back to the tribes as soon as they could identify which tribes they were. Some of them weren't around anymore, but they were trying to do this. So, yeah, I'm very aware of the issues, I have some friends who are native Americans. There are things I know about Native American traditions that I really wish--would make awesome things, really cool things about male-female relations that I can't tell you. My friend wasn't supposed to tell me either, except that his job in the tribe is to break all the rules. So he told me, but I can't tell you. But I try to be very careful. With Mercy I intended not to get too far into anything that might make people go "ouch", but as the series has grown--and as I've talked with Native people, I've have an awful lot of, particularly, Native women who are...a lot of young women ages, from about 14-18, have come up to me really appreciative of having a Native American heroine. And so, I've gotten a little braver--Certainly when my editor asked me to make Charles the star of the next one, he is a Native American. He was Native American back when Native Americans were Native Americans and had their culture and their language. Charles has several languages he won't speak, because the people are all dead and he feels that it's a bad thing, you don't wake spirits of the dead, so he doesn't do that. ... I'm very cognisant of the fact that there are limits and I don't want to push anybody's buttons. But so far all I've got are a whole bunch of people who write to me to tell me whether it's "Blackfoot" or "Blackfeet" and none of them agree either! [A brief quote from Briggs on Mercy's lack of curiosity regarding her Native American heritage.] I think it hit her earlier, the curiosity. She has a history major and there's a reason for that.