The Curly Mafia

The one-week countdown has begun! Except it seems that books have been sighted in stores and some who pre-ordered have already received copies, so I guess time is a wee bit fuzzy. Goodness knows time has been weird for me lately.

I have an item to add to my "you know you're a science fiction geek" list. As I mentioned yesterday, I had a bit of trouble adapting to the altitude in Colorado. I just felt tired and foggy all the time, and I didn't sleep very well. By Saturday afternoon, I was exhausted and strangely starving, in spite of eating everything in sight at lunch. I skipped the last session after doing my final workshop of the day and went up to my room to relax. They'd given the speakers a little goody bag of snacks, and I dug through it to find something to eat. There was a little packet of peanuts, and I remembered having heard something about peanuts being good for helping adjust to altitude, something about the protein and salt. Only later did I recall where I thought I'd heard that -- it's part of the remedy for dealing with the unpleasant effects of going into hyperspace (which is like being drunk, from the viewpoint of the glass of water) in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Maybe high altitude is like hyperspace because the peanuts did seem to work. Or maybe it was the thirty-minute nap I took.

For a writing conference, I don't think I got into too many discussions about writing. The primary topic of conversation seemed to be dealing with curly hair. There's something about the publishing industry that seems to draw curly-haired people. I think it must have something to do with all that extra brainpower making your hair curl. When I was growing up, I don't recall meeting too many people with hair anything like mine, and that was in the days before really good styling products (beyond AquaNet), effective straightening irons and powerful blow-dryers. But whenever I go to a writing conference, there are usually a lot of curly-haired people, especially among editors and agents. That's how I have half of my industry contacts -- the curly girls all find each other at any event and end up in a corner, sharing hair-care tips. I think I'm going to start a Curly Mafia in the publishing industry. I'll put together a web page and pass out cards about it at the next conference I go to. And then we'll rule the world!

But first, I have a few little things to deal with along the way. For instance, the newspaper now wants to do a photo shoot to go with that article, which means I need to re-clean my house. It won't be the epic adventure it was before because it's still mostly clean. I just need to tidy up a bit. I think I also need a haircut, if only I could find my stylist's number. I thought I'd filed it with my collection of business cards, but while I found some interesting, if useless, ones (including one person who's now dead), I didn't find the one I needed. Looks like it's Google to the rescue. What did we do in the days before the Internet?