Thank you for this offer, and I'll gladly take you up on it--after the holidays. Or, at least, after Christmas. I'm a grad student, teaching part time at a university, and working at Waldenbooks. Right now, I'm totally drained and don't want to even visit the post office.

I do want you to know that the reason I did not ask you to sign the book was not because you were too intimidating, but simply because I couldn't decide if it would be appropriate or not. I was at the conference as a scholar (I presented a paper on Robin McKinley's Damar fiction), but asking you to sign the book seemed to make this more of a fan convention, and I didn't see anyone else acting so, well, fan-girlish, so I decided to err on the safe side and merely say hi.