We woke early this morning (even earlier than I wanted to, thanks to Catherine) to trek up to DC for the National Book Festival on the Mall in D.C., most specifically, to catch a reading and signing by one of our favorite authors, Neil Gaiman, who was just one of a ton of authors out on a muddy, overcast Saturday to interact with America’s bibliophile community.

The reading was scheduled for 11:45; we arrived just in time to grab a spot toward the back of the tent and hear his introduction. Dressed in his signature black leather jacket, Neil read a bit of his new novel The Graveyard Book, due out on Tuesday everywhere (but specially available in limited quantities at the festival), and answered a few questions from the audience.

As the reading ended, Colleen and the kids hustled off to the sales tent to pick up a copy of the new book; I took a less direct route, circumnavigating the PBS Kids tent (and attendant interns in aardvark costumes), and lucking into passing the History and Biography area right as NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr gave a short talk about his decades-long career in journalism.

Meeting back up with the rest of the crew, books in hand, we queued up for the signing table, beginning a nearly four hour adventure in standing still, dodging raindrops, and shuffling tired babies back and forth as the very large crowd of Gaiman fans awaited their turn for an audience.

Our section of the crowd was an interesting mix of geeky folks; including a cool English guy and his American daughter, and a group of chattering fangirls who passed the time mooning over jacket flap photos, writing stick-figure Torchwood fanfic comics, and singing selections from the musical 1776. Then, it started raining. Long and hard. We found ourselves soaked to the bone (Colleen and Catherine caught a bit of a break, thanks to the generosity of an umbrella-loaning goth girl), though unwilling to bail on our position, having already invested a great deal of time to grab our coveted signed title pages (all the more rare, because this event was the only planned signing on the book tour).

As we finally saw the light at the end of our tunnel, the sun came out, drying everyone somewhat, and providing us the opportunity to catch a glimpse of this rainbow over the Capitol building:

Soon, we got our few minutes with a very tired, but still amiable author, who kindly complimented my Dalek T-shirt, and gamely signed our new copy of Graveyard and Andrew’s well-loved copy of The Wolves in the Walls, a cute children’s picture book Gaiman wrote with illustrator Dave McKean, with a cute little personalized note.

Thus ended the bigger part of our adventure; though on the way back to pick up our car in Arlington, we got passed by Obama and Biden’s big black bus motorcade (within a block or so of one of Senator McCain’s many condos) on their way to Fredericksburg for an evening rally. I’m now beginning to suspect that the candidates are now stalking us…