Fashion and the forgetful author

I’m up in Utah right now doing school visits and getting ready to present at the LDStorymakers writing conference. I love conferences because I get to see all of my cool writing friends. Also, the bow-tied editor himself is coming out to be the keynote speaker.

I’m going to pick him up at the airport in a little while. I wonder if I should have warned him about my driving skills beforehand. Then again, most of my girl main characters are bad drivers, so if that hasn’t clued him in as to why I may have to circle the airport several times before I find his terminal, well, he just needs to learn to read between the lines a little better.

Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the fact that I continually sabotage myself with my own forgetfulness. Example one: I hate hair hanging in my face, so sometimes while I style it, I’ll stick two bobby pins at the sides of my hair so it will dry up and away from my face. I generally remember to take the bobby pins out when I’m done.

But I didn’t on Monday when I went and spoke to a YA lit class at BYU. It wasn’t until afterwards when I was running my hands through my hair that I realized they were still there. I’m hoping that since bobby pins are brown, maybe no one noticed them.

Example two: yesterday I was hurrying to go to The King’s English bookstore to sign my stock and say hello to fellow author and friend, James Dashner, who was doing a book signing. Trying to be quick about things, I put my earrings in while I was curling my hair. Then I rushed off the bookstore.

It turns out James was there on Tuesday, not Wednesday–argh–but I still got to meet and chat with the ladies at King’s English and sign some of my books.

It wasn’t until I was going to bed last night that I looked in the mirror and noticed that I was only wearing one earring. I thought I’d lost the other one–but no, further investigation revealed that I’d only put one in.

I really shouldn’t try and do two things at once and I just hope everyone I met on this trip expects authors to be eccentric people who do things like only wearing one earring at a time.

You’d think I would have learned after my infamous sandal incident. My house has a lot of tile which is hard on my feet so I have about three pairs of flip flops I wear around the house all the time. One day I couldn’t find a matching pair, so I just grabbed two that didn’t match. One was black and one was bright yellow.

A few hours later the school called me to come get a sick child and it wasn’t until I was walking into the office that I realized I was still wearing the mismatched sandals. Yeah, this is a great way to impress the office staff. They’re probably all waiting for me to do a Van Gogh and cut my ear off or something.