Young Nerds Convention

Enjoying Some Pizza Before The Show

Friday night we had the opportunity to see and talk with not one but five young adult authors.  And also got to watch one of the most entertaining shows I have seen in a long time.  It was a book launch for Brandon Mull's final book in his Beyonders series (Mull is also author of the popular Fablehaven and Candy Shop Wars series).  Sam, Connie, and I have all read the first two books and Grandma Beth had pre-ordered the last book for Sam for Christmas so we were excited when the book finally arrived this week and extra excited that there was going to be a launch party.

The show was set to start at 7:00 and despite the fact we got there 6:20 we ended up behind three or four hundred people in line to get in.  Everybody had to fit into a high school auditorum, so I was a little stressed that we were not going to make it in, but fortunately we not only made it in, but actually got pretty good seats.


After Brandon Mull's wife gave an introduction, we were surprised to learn that not only was Brandon Mull there, but there were also five other authors:

Christopher Paolini -  "Eragon", The Inheritance Series (This guy is famous for having published Eragon when he was 15)
Richard Paul Evans - "Michael Vey, The Prisoner of Cell 25" series (Also author of the well know "The Christmas Box")
Chad Morris - "The Inventor's Secret" (This is Morris's first book and was just released in 2013 but it has very positive reviews on Good Reads)
Tyler Whitesides - "Janitors" series
Brandon Sanderson - "Mist born" series  and ghost writer for Robert Jordans books that he didn't finish (He is a young adult writer per se, so a lot of kids don't know who he is, but I have read a bunch of his books)


So apparently Chad Morris and Brandon Mull used to be part of a comedy troupe.  And so that comedy troupe did a show as part of the book launch.  It was really pretty hilarious.  I caught a few of the best parts on film.  This first one was a parody of the song "The Misty Mountains" that the dwarves sing in the new "Hobbit" movie.  They kind of did it all of a sudden so I missed the first half, which was the best part, but I caught the second half.  (Sorry my camera phone is not the greatest)

Then later there was a parody of the song "Popular" from the musical "Wicked".

They also had a pretty funny skit with Christopher Paolini going on a dating game show with the characters Katniss Everdeen (Hunger Games), Bella (Twilight Series), Éponine (Les Miserables) and Dora the Explorer.  I cannot remember all of what happened, but I do remember everyone laughing hysterically when Dora the Explorer teaches everyone how to say "Liar" in Spanish after Eponine fakes being shot so that Christopher Paolini will hold her tight.

After the show it was time for the book signing.  We crowded towards the signing table to hopefully not have to wait forever to get books signed.  Then they announced that people would come up according to the number on tickets they had handed out when people were waiting in the big line before the show.  They started with the numbers 200-210.  They gave one ticket to each group of people.  So each group of 10 numbers actually represented 20 or 30 people.  We were number 513.  So yeah.  We waited a long time.

Brandon Sanderson wasn't part of the book signing, so he was just hanging out and so I went and talked to him

Fortunately Sam and his buddy Bron had fun running around and there were lots of free posters for them to collect and also there were people dressed up as characters from Brandon Mulls books, so the boys had blast.



Then finally at 11:30 at night.  We got Brandon Mull to sign our books.  He must have already signed 1000 books by the time he got to us, but he was still cheerful and he took time to pose with the boys (He actually smiled better than in this picture, but there were still a hundred people behind us in line, so we didn't try to take another picture.