Until now I’ve been all mature and shit.

Oh puh-leeze. Nobody’s going to watch me at breakfast and be as unimpressed as my mother is when I don’t eat my crusts. They’ll all be too busy being afraid someone will notice their hairy earlobes.

See, I loaded the "I'm going to BlogHer" badge on the sidebar a while ago, like this:

!!!

...and when I did my maritime homies pelted me with limp cods and I took it, obediently, as I must.

The panel I’m speaking on—at this gigantic conference of 1200 or so spouse-mockery sufferers—is called ‘The Transformational Power of Blogging’ and I’m not sure yet if that means I’ll have to take off my shoe to show you the sixth toe on my right foot. Totally grew after I switched to Squarespace. That’s another matter.

In high school, I was inclined to both vibrate with nervous energy and inspire venom across the board. And yeah, yeah. Everyone says that.

<falsetto> I am a wounded non-cheerleader and please don’t hate me and write mean things about me in lipstick on a bathroom stall, and by the way, that’s totally gross, and I was only easy once, and it takes one to know one, and I hope that mean-worded lipstick creeps up your face and gives you pinkeye, you two-faced jerk.

That’s why I can’t stand writing this post. Because it’s been done so thoroughly already and overdone angst makes me cranky. And because I am a grown-up now, dammit, with a brain that functions at a respectable 32% capacity when a random cross-section of carnies was found to operate at an average of only 31.5% capacity.

All that is why I am too cool to feel this way.

<squeal> I’m so NERVOUS! What if NOBODY TALKS TO ME?! Oh woe, woe is the WALLFLOWER!

<photoshopped lolcat w/caption> O WHERE IZ MY HAPPY PILLZ?!

We are all babies who came out naked and screaming and aghast at our own hairy earlobes. And if blogher #972 has enviously fleshy, perky ears in comparison to yours? (whispers) You should see her belly-button OMG OMG OMG. But, you know, kind of handy. She hangs her spare house keys on it.

So yes indeed, too cool for school. Or better put: too cool to be emotionally crippled / scarred / etc. by social hijinx. Yet now it’s three weeks away I am all NOTHING TO WEAR and Why must my legs be so weirdly short? and Please tell me that’s not how I always smell as if Chicago has a moratorium against stinky, short-legged women who show up in a cropped shirt last seen in 1992.

If you’re going too and you see me wandering aimlessly through the hoards, please refrain from pantzing me. Or at least ask me first if my knickers are straight. Or just tap me on the shoulder and say hello so that I can wrap myself around your leg koala-style for three days straight. And if you use lipstick, use it for the powers of good, and wipe it clean when you’re done.

+++

What whets me for the impending hordes is the slightly lesser-known Maritime Blog’Er, which was last weekend, during which I failed utterly to drink absinthe out of the skull of a dead poet, and reverted instead to hard lemonade, which is totally lightweight and reminds me of that time in grade eleven when my friend Jill threw up bright purple vokda cooler all over my white jeans.

There’s Bon, who is prolific and who stuns me into gaping nods with every post. And Mad, who is now officially a viral genius in the good and non-conjuctivital way. And Hannah, who is one heck of a feisty thing both on the internet (privately) and behind the wheel. And the legendary Slouching Mom, an honourary cod-kisser who joined us from afar, as well as WordNerd, who is new to us but who showed up smiling with beer and comic books and happily filled our Acadian vacancy. And Thordora, who was missed this time around but whose wicked tats were thought of often.

We all sat in Mad's living room with beer and whoopie pies and the skulls of dead poets and we gossiped, and truth serum was thick in the air, and I almost cried about a dead forsaken cat. It was awesome.

We snapped together with an audible click, as we always do, and the conversation was invigorating, as it always is. But this time they unknowingly set a strange new panic in motion with how articulate and passionate they are about books and learnedness. They are not loud-talky, but rather happen to not blink stupidly when someone says the words ‘Margaret Atwood’ or ‘Ulysses’ or ‘Bingley’s Arse’.

I sat there quietly, listening, having trouble breathing. It’s a weight on my chest, the prospect of the book in their hands, and in the hands of people like them, and like you.

BlogHer marks the launch of it all—on July 20, my birthday, I’ll post here with the link to the new author site and the book site, as well as the pre-order info. My cards for the conference are in the mail, with the URLs for both sites in black and white, inked. Any day now my editor will send me an email that begins with brace yourself and contains final line-edits on the manuscript.

After four years of sporadic, unseen piracy it’s all becoming very real.

People are going to talk about the book over absinthe or cheap vokda coolers. And they’re going to… think things about it. And about the person who wrote it. And I’m terrified. Really, truly scared. You might think it’s dumb. Or boring. Or contrived. Or pretentious. Or worse? Your 8-14 year-old kid might think those things.

The secret will be out: that I know about as much about writing books as I know about compost removal. Which is to say I can stare at books and know they exist but I can’t bear to get too close to them in case I see my own maggots.

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Justin:  So, it’s all going to be indoors, right?

Kate:  I think so.

Justin:  (snickers)

Kate:  What’s so funny?

Justin:  …because if any of it happened outdoors you would all melt in the sunlight and there’d be a thousand little puddles on the ground, each one with a laptop sitting in the middle of it.

Kate:  So what you're saying is that the only thing that makes you hotter than my ass is the couch that’s crocheted to it.

Justin:  Mmm-hmm.