Richelle Mead Signing Southampton

Richelle is easily one of my most favourite authors. I am completely obsessed with her Vampire Academy series, and her other two adult series are well up there on my faves list as well. Hearing she was coming to the UK for signings made me scream. Literally. I was ridiculously excited and text my best friends and we all agreed we'd have to go. No way could we miss this chance! So we made our way on Thursday to Southampton from where we live a couple hours away. Getting to Southampton was easy, but we were not so good at finding our way to the car park and got turned around a bunch. I think it took us about half an hour but never mind, we made it.

We got to the Waterstones where the signing was being held and headed downstairs to where it was being held. There we sat and filled out a quiz for a prize draw, and also took part with this:

It's a 'find your vampire name' spinner...thing. And when you'd spun it and gotten all the parts you needed for it, the 'name' was filled out on one of these enrollment forms:

If you can't make it out, my name came out as Mistress Camilla Dashkov The Wrathful. Not happy about having 'Dashkov' in my name, but 'Cam' is pretty close to 'Cem' so its kind of fitting. E, got the best name though, with both 'Rose' and 'Ozera' as part of it. Tough the end of R's was 'the Everlasting' which was pretty cool to! They also had a disk that you could spin, one side had 'Moroi' on it, the other 'Strigoi'. For those who haven't yet read the series (what the hell are you waiting for?!) Moroi are good, mortal vampires and Strigoi the evil killers. Both E. and I got Moroi and R, who is probably the sweetest of us, got Strigoi. Which amused the three of us no end! There were little badges for this too, being Moroi, I got a Moroi one where as R. got a Strigoi one:
The pen was free too, we picked them up when Richelle signed our books. They're actually a soft pink color, but for whatever reason it came out orange on my phone.

Then finally Richelle came out and did a reading from Spirit Bound. A spoiler free one sadly, though she nearly said the spoilery bit of the scene she was reading, but she caught herself just in time ;) [fyi it was the same reading that's been online for a while, you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viGbmrLk_s0] She also said that (her mistake) she had an old version of that scene, and she told us a little about what happened at the end of it.
After the reading she did a short Q & A session which was cool, got some interesting answers but nothing revealing about any of her series, as always! Then it was on to the actual signing and pictures with her:

Before heading home. We actually manged to get more lost getting out of Southampton because of lack of good signs! Took us about 40mins to actually be out on the road, but we were all pretty giddy anyway and didn't care all that much. We all agree it was a great time and Richelle was really, really sweet!! I really hope that her publishers bring her back to the UK some time so we've got a chance to go and meet her again. One thing only could have made it better for the three of us, and that would have been our other best friend being able to come with us. The whole thing was run really smoothly and was a good laugh from start to finish. So anyone who is a fan already, you should try and meet her if you can, anyone who's yet to read her books, read them! ;)