I'm the brother of Pink Bunkadoo above, so I met Brandon at my wedding. (...Wait, let's start over...)
Brandon and I were editors together at the Leading Edge magazine at BYU (and sat around the table together for a couple years before that). We didn't interact much outside of TLE until at least my second year there, because I'm not a very social person. Though I had a job at a computer lab, and several times I let everyone in at night for Starcraft LAN parties. (That was a bunch of fun.) Then I started going to Brandon and Fell and Tage's writing group, where Brandon was just starting a little book called Dragonsteel, after having recently finished going through a little book called Elantris (which I didn't read until a couple years later). I originally wanted to be a writer as well, but the editorial bug bit me at TLE, so I went into that instead. Three years in a row Brandon and Fell and I went to World Fantasy Con, where I was their in with editors, since the theory was that editors would be happier to open up to people who want to be editors than they would to another annoying writer pestering them. I was there for that fateful night in Montreal where we tracked down Moshe Feder and cornered him for two hours at the launch party of some e-publishing thing (which folded a year later), letting him tell us about all the cool stuff he was working on (Moshe is a fun and talkative guy, so this was no chore at all for either side). This resulted in Brandon and Fell both sending him books, which he got around to reading much later—Elantris and Blacker Darkness. (Though Blacker Darkness didn't get picked up, alas.) —Oh, and also, because of these conventions, I ended up owing Brandon $200 for over two years, which he never ever bugged me about (err...don't go asking him for money now). I think it was when I finally got a job teaching English in Japan that I at last sent him the money, and it wasn't long after that that I finally got an editing job (at TOKYOPOP).
