My Hand Hurts

My Hand Hurts

I couldn't quite believe my eyes when I saw the stacks of books. They're finally here!

Last week, on our way home from that Green and Pleasant Land, we stopped over at another green and pleasant place: Georgia. Sure, in July it's hotter there than the Heat Miser in a wool sweater on a city bus, but we'd just come from a record-breaking, street melting (seriously) heat wave in London, and at least in Atlanta they have air conditioning.

Our purpose in Atlanta was singular: to sign the preordered copies of Ptolus. There were, however, fringe benefits. We got treated like royalty by the good folks at White Wolf who never let us buy a drink or a meal, and in particular by CEO Mike Tinney, who even put us up at his grand house for the weekend. We got a tour of the White Wolf offices and saw yet another example of what really ties the game industry together: toy-filled cubicles.

When a shipping company debacle (or two) made the arrival of Ptolus copies late, we had to "suffer" through the wait by playing in a Vampire game run by Will Hindmarch, a wonderful GM, to be sure. (My rather effete vampire's only real contribution was digging through a disgusting bathroom garbage can... it's really better left undescribed.)

When the copies did arrive, what we thought might be a two-day job had to be finished in one day. Luckily for us, we had lots of wonderful help from White Wolf interns Danielle and Zach. They made the whole assembly line work -- the intern would hand me an open book, I'd sign, then pass the book to Sue, who did the numbering. The whole process was orchestrated by Kelly Barnes-Herrmann and Brad Butkovich, and aided by Aaron Voss, Fred Yelk Woodruff, Oscar Garza, and Mike Mariolis.

As chance would have it, the final number of copies preordered through the website was almost exactly 1,000 (that's direct through us, not through retail, which is a much greater number). That means we numbered all signed copies as N/1000. That doesn't mean there are only 1,000 copies in existence, although I'm sure that rumor will get circulated anyway. (I, for one, am glad that the rise of the Internet hasn't quashed the time-honored tradition of the wild game-industry rumor-mongering that goes on at game tables across the country -- but that's a topic for another column...)

A very few copies -- probably about 15 or so -- also got little doodles from me of ratmen, Sheva Callister, wizards casting lightning bolts, and so on. This usually happened when the process got slowed down for some reason and I was bored. Hopefully, recipients will think they're fun, and not worry that someone scribbled in their brand new book. They're small, I promise.

I signed a few other copies for promotional needs as well, so I ended up signing about 1,030 copies of the book. Everyone joked around about my hand needing ice before and during the process, and I laughed, thinking it was just exaggerated for fun. The truth was, though, all that signing really did cramp my hand pretty badly. Both hands, really, because the other was used to make sure the book stayed nice and steady despite all the heavy books being shifted around me. Seriously, each book weighs six pounds. That's some serious thudding as they're stacked on the table and moved around.

The other thing that I noticed was that about halfway through "Signing Day," my name stopped having any meaning to me. It was as though I was in some kind of weird mental zone, hypnotized by my own signature. Mentally, I was no longer forming letters -- just shapes that happened to look like letters. Luckily, my signature is an illegible mess on a good day, so no one's going to know the difference.

I'll probably have jarring flashbacks for months whenever I'm asked to sign a credit card slip or a check or something. Hopefully they won't involve screaming. But that's okay. In truth, it was a fun experience.

Below is a little photostory from the big day. Click on each image for a larger version of the picture. Photos by Sue and Danielle.


Arriving at work Friday morning. Fingers at 100 percent. I've signed 500 books in a single sitting before. How hard could 1,000 be?	The cart holds about 150 books (and Sue). So imagine almost seven of these carts, and you'll get an idea of how many books were signed.

Sue is almost obscured by the stack of signed and numbered books ready to go back out to the warehouse. There, Kelley, Zach, Fred, and others were preparing the shipping boxes with bubble-wrap and copies of Night of Dissolution.	We started about 9:30 and finished at 4 pm (with an hour off for lunch).

Here's a work in progress: a little doodle of the Spire.	A job well done! (Well, at least a job done.) Here I am at the end of the day with White Wolf honcho Mike Tinney.

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