When Life Gives you an Orange with a Lemon Slice in it

...Seriously, what do you do with it?

So, you should know by the time and dates that Dusted Glen runs on a schedule. I write up the posts and, on a good day, manage to have a backlog of them an entire month ahead of schedule, but sometimes stuff happens that just can't be so neatly scheduled.

Take Cold Days for example (You should know by now that I'm a huge fan of the Dresden Files series.)

Cold Days was released on the 27th of November, and I wrote up a post ahead of time announcing the release. What I didn't tell you was that I preordered the book, and not just any edition, I got the Limited Edition Signed Copy of Cold Days (though it's sold out, you can see it Here.)


It just got real, yo

For my brother's recent birthday I had preordered a comic book that was released on the 13th. His birthday, meanwhile, was the 14th. I wasn't expecting it to be so hastily portal'd and cannon-shot through the wall of my house and into my lap in one day, but that's what happened. On the 14th it arrived in the mail, exactly like I had fantasized about.



I have boring fantasies.

So, after such a great turnout I waited for a similar experience with Cold Days. The 27th of November rolled around and my super-excited blog post went with it. That's fine, I can wait until the 28th. The autographed copy was going to be sweet. I would have a token of awesomeness from the best writer who wrote the awesomest story.

 

 

So I waited.

 

 

 

 

And waited.

 

 

 

 

And waited.

 

 

 

Finally, after the six and a half minutes of watching these videos, I decided to check the shipping information (in all seriousness it was about 3-4 days.)

 

They hadn't even shipped it yet.
 

So let's go ahead and borrow from this guy and use the Hulk-O-Meter:



In reverse it's about a green guy who slowly gets nerdier.

 

So I'd have to say I'm at Hulk-O-Meter Level 1. I'm not exactly David Banner, but I'm pretty in check. Sure, there are people reading Cold Days and have probably even finished it at this point. If I couldn't wait I could have easily run down to Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy on release day. Still though, I'm okay with it because I'm not just getting any old copy of Cold Days, I'm getting an Autographed First Edition copy of Cold Days from the God of Awesome himself.



So I wait, and wait and wait.

I ran out of time-lapse videos, so here's a picture of Chris Hemsworth.

Finally. Finally!

...Barnes and Noble tells me it's shipping.

And it'll be here the 4th of December.

What? Bullcrap! That's an entire week after the actual release date!

It's okay, it's okay. Autographed copy. Awesome author. I'm at Hulk-O-Meter Level Two because of the wait, but I can breeze through it reading other books, which I do.

 All at record speed, I might add.

We end up going out Monday, and when I'm picking up coffee at a bookstore for my dad I see this:

Copies and copies and copies of it.

Blarg!

 

Hulk-O-Meter Level Three attained!

But suddenly: Chai latte.



My mantra: Autographed copy, awesome, coming tomorrow. I resist the urge, get home, and find a nondescript box waiting for me: It arrived a day early. I'm David Banner on the Hulk-O-Meter

I pet it, hold it, look at it, open the book and see the autograph. It looks printed on the page, but after some hard looking I see where it's actually been written, by hand, because it faintly shows up on the page behind it. Hot damn, I don't even care who autographed it. It could be a drunk homeless man Jim Butcher paid to sign 500 copies, doesn't matter, it's my signed copy of Cold Days.



Which might explain why it said "Jim Beam" instead.

I don't get much time to read it for the first two days. but come Wednesday I devour it. It's everything I ever wanted, and more. I'm sitting down, planning to spent the last half hour of Tuesday reading. Man, Thomas is awesome, good thing they got rid of Molly too. Oh hey, there wasn't morning fog, something's about to happ-

...Wait, what?

Did I read something wrong?

No...

What's this? The page numbers are off.

They're repeating from previous pages. It jumps from page 216 back to 185.

How long does this go for?

Up to page 216 again and then resumes its normal program at 249.

I'm missing 31 to 33 pages...

In my book.

In my autographed book.

In my autographed book that I can't finish because it's missing PAGES!!!

 

SMASH!!!

 

READER SMASH!!!

 

ANGRY READER SMASH!!!

 

I sat down at my computer, tried looking up information about it, and got only one person reviewing the book saying they had an autographed copy with the same problem of missing pages.
 

"I paid extra money for the limited signed edition, and my copy ended up having a printing error. Pages 345-376 are repeated twice, and then the book skips to page 409. It is completely missing pages 377-408. I feel like I wasted my money, and it was very frustrating to get to that point in the book and then have to stop reading because of the missing pages."

 

After that, I kid you not, this happened:

 

 

Reader cry!

 

I tried to hold it together and be a Big Girl, I really did. I might have been able to if just a week earlier my copy of Walking Dead Volume 17 had the same exact problem, though probably not. This was Harry Dresden. This was my autographed copy of Cold Days. So, yeah, I cried.
 

...A lot.
 

A lot more than every other fan combined, probably.
 

Very well aware how much of a nerd I am.

 

I can't even order a new autographed copy of Cold Days because it's sold out. I can't get a replacement because, like, is Jim Butcher going to run around an replace everyone's signed copy? Bad enough that he's in the hospital (probably infected by a disgruntled reader with missing book pages.)
 

I guess I'll hang onto my autographed copy. Maybe all of the readers with 31 missing pages have to get together and fuse their extra pages into some kind of Sacred Tome of Dresden that opens a portal into Chicago.

 

Not a special alternate reality, just Chicago.

 



Boring fantasies, remember?