Shoesday: Got My Writing Boots On

The Story:

Last weekend I sat around the apartment, ate more carbs and drank more wine than was good for me, read an entire Carter Dickson novel and watched a variety of movies. This post isn't about last weekend. This is about the weekend before last, when I went to the Berkeley Mystery Writing Intensive, where authors such as Cornelia Read, Sophie Littlefield, Tim Maleeny, Tony Broadbent, Juliet Blackwell, Seth Harwood and Some Movie Guy held forth on topics useful to those interested in making a living out of murder, without all the messy cleanup*. (The event was organized by Sharon Johnson, whose powers of organization are such that she probably could actually herd cats, and then get them to fold flyers.) Also on the guest list was Sophie's agent, Barbara Poelle** who, by dint of her profession, was immediately the object of the desperate attention of the great unpublished hordes***. I don't know what Sophie has on her, but it must be good. I knew coming in that she didn't represent the sort of stuff I write,**** but that didn't stop me from piping up at every opportunity with increasingly inane comments, to the point where she not only knew my name, but pronounced it with a little sigh.

But what's the point? What does this have to do with the picture at the top of this post? You ask.

Thanks for the reminder, I say, hauling myself back from the brink of the mud puddle of self-loathing. The point is that I was wearing these boots on Saturday. So, while from the knees up I may have been a stammering moron, with two unsalable books on my hard drive and another one on the way, wearing a shirt that I didn't realize gapped quite so much at the top and asking ridiculously contrived questions the answers to which were only of interest to me, from the knees down I was awesome.



*I totally would have been an assassin, if it wasn't for the dry cleaning bills. Also, blood makes me pass out.
**Occasionally described as "slithery."
***Okay, there were about twenty of us.
****i.e. Barely comprehensible ravings of insanity, with lots of footnotes.