Alas, all my clever plans were foiled.
There I was, chatting up author James Dashner on Twitter, helpfully letting him know his countdown clock was wrong, and using my trademarked and incredibly clever repartee to show him that I was somebody he could not only share his secrets with but also could borrow his laptop. I told him I'd see him later tonight, then hurried off to get the girls from their high school. I had them all booked for babysitting. I would hit the launch party, graciously decline the myriad offers from all the authors to join them for dinner, then spend a few hours writing at Barnes & Noble.
What could go wrong?
Alright, aside from running behind forty minutes, I did find it odd that there was parking available. So very not a good sign for Mr. Dashner. The bookstore almost looked deserted. I walked through the door and was surprised to hear no sounds of hobnobbing. No dinner invitations wafting in the air-conditioned breeze.
"May I help you?" asked a voice from somewhere behind a stack of books.
I had missed it; I was sure of it. I thought it was supposed to run until 6pm, but obviously the party wrapped up early. I should mention, however, that at this point alarm bells were going off within my mind. It was as if I was waking from a daydream and was taking sudden notice of my surroundings. Whatever it was that had happened, I knew as surely as I knew I was 40 minutes behind schedule that I had gotten something horribly wrong.
"I am here for the James Dashner launch party?" I said with not too much sheepishness.
"Oh! That's tomorrow," replied the kindly lady from behind the stack.
I wasn't forty minutes late; I was a day early.
After some merry and pleasant conversation, I purchased a book (Shannon Hale's Forest Born
There is a part of me that died inside. Maybe just a little. How embarrassing. But I promised myself years ago to stop beating myself up about these things. What can I do? I'm me and for the rest of my life I'm going to be screwing up like this. Hey, I even had alarms all set for the wrong date in my iPhone.
More embarrassing for me was knowing that Mr. Dashner probably thought I was an idiot by now. There goes my chance of borrowing his laptop and attending a private authors' retreat in his cabin with the cloaked and mysterious Provo kidlit-erati.
Sure enough, when I checked in with my Twitter stream two hours later, I found the following:
JamesDashner:
@DouglasCootey I'm assuming you meant tomorrow night, but I just thought I'd make sure! Tues.
Oh, well. Maybe I can introduce myself as somebody else.