I am currently in NYC, and it’s BookExpo America time, kidlets. Stand by for INSANE SCHEDULE.

If you would like to not-spontaneously run into me, I am going to be here:

Thursday:

4PM-6PM TEEN AUTHOR CARNIVAL, Jefferson Market Branch NYPL

Signing of Better Than Yesterday paperback, Q&A, giveaway of vintage English boarding school prefect badges, Cadbury’s chocolate, super secret contraband Knightley bookmarks, and other awesome people doing more awesome things than me.

7PM, The Diamonds Reading/Signing Extravaganza with Surprise Musical Guest (not me). Borders Columbus Circle.

My friend Ted. I will be cheering. Loudly.

Friday:

9AM-Evening: BookExpo America, the Javits Center, NYC

I’m in ur boothz takin ur ARCs. Also, wandering exhibition floor, video camera in hand.

Also going to Kidlit Drinks Night and BEAtweetup so come say hi!

Saturday:

9:30AM-10:30AM Driving Success With Teen and Tweens: Authors Share Online Success Stories panel discussion, Room 1E16, BookExpo America, Javits Center

I am moderating the Panel Discussion of Awesome starring the lovely Jessica Burkhart, Julia DeVillers, Maureen Johnson and Sarah Mlynowski.

10:30AM-5PM: BookExpo America

Back to wandering. And ARC-getting. And video-cameraing.

5:30-7:30 PM: S&S Pulse/Aladdin Author Thing.

7:30PM-9:30PM: Saturday Night At BEA YA/MG Drinks Extravaganza, Common Ground, NYC (206 Avenue A at 13th)

Julia DeVillers, Bennett Madison and I are co-hosting a massive drinks night. Please come.

Sunday:

BookExpo? Or sleep. Only time will tell.

I’ve been digging myself out from beneath a massive pile of work lately, so it’s not surprising that I’ve, well, forgotten to do one or two things that a person should never forget to do. Thankfully these things I speak of are in no way related to personal hygiene, or the paying of bills, but they are, nonetheless, problematic.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that I forgot to get an author photo taken. And, hypothetically, I realized this with, oh, 12 hours until I needed to hand in said author photo to my editor.

Yeah, I forgot about my own author photo, the one that goes on the back of the book, the one that’s really supposed to be a picture of Violet Haberdasher, since we all know that she’s the “real” author of Knightley, but Violet has been kind enough to let me pretend to be her–at least when it comes to appearing on the back of the book.

My housemates and I were on our way to the park (for reference, we wound up coming home with the Free Chairs of Awesome from my previous post), and I accosted one of them on the stairs.

“Ellie, help!” I whined. “I need an author photo. Would you just point this camera at me and take like ten pictures of my face? I can’t find my remote or I’d do it myself.”

She agreed, so I changed into a ruffly blouse, stood on the stairwell, and let my housemate take a bunch of photos of my face while everyone else waited in the doorway, rolling their eyes and being all, “Robyn, is this really time for a photo shoot?”

Now, you’d think that the photos would have come out horribly, but I had a stroke of luck: the awesome gods decided to intervene, and voila, here it is, my shiny shiny new author photo:

Squee! I love it!

Today, when my housemates and I were walking home from a picnic on Primrose Hill, we saw two chairs by the side of the road. Now, you are probably thinking that this story involves unpleasant odors, awkward stains, or else the sorts of chairs that are usually abandoned by the side of the road, but you would be WRONG in thinking this, as the title of this blog post clearly describes said chairs as awesome.

Anyway. Upon close examination, these chairs appeared just as enticing as they had looked from across the road. My housemates and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Free chairs.” “Yeah.” “Guess we should take them.” “Guess so.” But of course we were only playing nonchalant, or at least I know I was, because this chair was freaking poetry, left by the side of the road for me to take home and cuddle.

I picked up one of the chairs. And then a woman walked out of a nearby townhouse carrying a third matching chair.

“Oh, hi,” I said, putting down the chair and petting it lightly, to show the woman that I meant no harm to her clearly beloved furnishings that she was in no way abandoning curbside. “Sorry, were you getting rid of these?”

“I am,” she said.

“Oh, um, how much are they?” I asked.

“They’re free,” the woman said, as though I were mental, as though I were the sort of person who abandons these sort of chairs for no compensation.

“Well, we live just around the corner, and they’re gorgeous,” I said. “Can we have them?”

“Of course,” the woman said. “Now let me tell you about those chairs. They’re 180 years old, and I bought them from an antiques dealer, and just had them custom upholstered, but they don’t fit in my house.”

“Er, right,” my housemates and I said, tightening our grubby little mitts on the crazy lady’s nice, expensive heirloom chairs. “Well, thank you.”

And then we got home and were all, dude, free chairs!  Here’s mine (isn’t she a beaut?) :

And we’re back with another installment of this week’s Cannes adventures:

This house was awesome.

Mary and me, just chillin’.

Tony wishes this car were his.

Cameron and I rode in the trunk of a vintage Rolls Royce, as the backseat was already filled with models sitting on each other’s laps. The police were not amused. Good thing the paparazzi masked our getaway.

The paparazzi masking our getaway from the French Police, and also, somewhere inside that mess, Paris Hilton. Poor thing.

Haha, paparazzi! If only you too had spent the evening dancing on a yacht with Paris Hilton, then perhaps your photos would have come out like this one–nice and, I don’t know–noninvasive?

The crew, still partying strong at 5AM.

The London crew and I spent this past week at Cannes for the film festival, generally wreaking havoc, partying barefoot on boats, throwing glasses of champagne over our shoulders, and doing many other things which I, as an author of books for teens and tweens, should neither promote, advertise, nor advocate–in so many words.

The pictures, I think, speak for themselves:

“Robyn, can you stop playing paparazzi for one minute?”

*Looks around innocently* Who, me?

No, really? Yes, really! Chilling at the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc. F Scott Fitzgerald stayed here and used the hotel as his basis for the Hôtel des Etrangers in his novel Tender is the Night.

We have maybe crashed the Prophet after party.

There is nothing funnier than watching drunk ladies try to dance in their premiere gowns…

…Except maybe Alex deciding to jump into the pool in the middle of a black tie premiere after party–with all of his clothes on.

I lied. There is nothing funnier than watching Alex, sopping wet bowtie and soaked red trousers, rock the dance floor whilst dripping puddles of pool water with every step. Or maybe there is nothing funnier than everyone’s faces as they tried to figure out what exactly we were about. If they had asked, I would have gladly told them: POOL JUMPING, SON!

Stay tuned for Part II.

I’m back from Cannes, my laptop stuffed full of photos, my wallet bursting with business cards, and my crazy crazy brain full of even more insane stories. And yeah, I’ve returned home with a tan, but I’ve also brought a few other new things with me back to London:

Say hello to my steampunk hand luggage, which is so effing badass that I can’t even put its level of badassery into words. Suffice to say that I will totally be taking this baby to BEA next week.

Oh, hi there, 1980’s purse big enough to fit my DSLR camera with 14-42mm lens. Just wanted to let you know that you’re awesome. Love, Robyn.

The best part of the new bags? The 20% discount I got for paying cash.:)

Here’s another gem of a let’s-laugh-at-other-people’s-awkward-and-effed-up-lives website, again thanks to a tip from Under The Button: Awkward Family Photos.

The blog, which features reader submitted family photos that, for one reason or another, make you cringe and/or snort simultaneously, is endlessly entertaining. Were I to see these same photos on the walls of my friends’ childhood homes, it would be bad manners to smirk. But, with a browse of Awkward Family Photos, I can smirk away to my bitter little heart’s content. Here’s a sample of the family portraits gone wrong featured on the site:

I’m thinking that these kids grew up watching Dexter and American Psycho rather than Dexter’s Laboratory and American Pie.

I would pay good money to see this kid’s baby pictures.

Right. Er, last week I agreed to participate in the Teen Author Carnival, which, at the time, was a nice little reading at the Jefferson Market Branch of the New York Public Library with about eight authors. It promised to be a good time, and I invited all of you to come out and see me embarrass myself. Remember?

Well, it grew. Expanded, really. And now it is not just a handful of authors sitting behind a table reading excerpts from their books, but a MEGAEVENT starring the following authors: Melissa Anelli, Lauren Barnholdt, Coe Booth, Libba Bray, Jessica Burkhart, Susane Colasanti, Sarah Cross, Claudia Gray, Jenny Han, Sarah McLean, Taylor Morris, Greg Neri, Michael Northrup, Robyn Schneider, Beckie Weinheimer, Melissa Walker, Sasha Watson and Michelle Zink.

Also, I am fairly certain that I will find MANY other ways to embarrass myself besides just reading, as there now promises to be Q&A sessions, readings, group activities and giveaways. So you should probably come. And bring your friends.

What’s that? You don’t remember where or when? All information is here, but for you lazy ones who don’t want to make that extra click, it’s May 28, 4pm, Jefferson Market Branch of the NYPL, 425 Avenue of the Americas. Thanks to Devyn, Mitali and Korianne for setting this up!

Last month, I saw a job posting requiring a photographer with experience shooting runway. Photographers whose portfolios did not contain examples of their previous runway work need not apply, the advert said. And so I made it my mission that, the next time a company offered $500 a day for some runway shots, I’d have no problem submitting my meager little portfolio. That’s how I found myself in the pit at London’s Alternative Fashion Week, jostling elbow to elbow with the other members of the press (um, let’s gloss over how I got into said pit…), my camera at the ready.

The photos came out fabulously, and I was showing them to my housemates the next day when I, um, sold them. My housemate’s fiance owns a magazine, and he happened to walk into the room and ask what we were looking at. Conveniently, the magazine went to press two days later. Containing my pictures. Here are a few (low-res versions) that didn’t make the cut:

Another pun, but fear not, fearful blog readers, I’m fairly certain that four days of sun, sand and cinema will stamp it out of me. That’s right, I’m off to Cannes for the film festival today, and I’ve set up a series of blog posts to publish whilst I’m away, so that I don’t fail at BEDA Fail Atonement Month, and also so that I’m not stuck blogging desperately from my iPhone, as was the case a few fateful weekends ago in Oxfordshire. Anyway, I am here:

A few weeks ago, a friend and I were walking through Spitalfields Market with a bunch of sandwiches and wine, on our way to Hoxton Square for a picnic, when two women stopped us. “Can we take your picture?” they asked. “It’s for Vogue Street Chic.”

Needless to say, I was skeptical. My friend and I were dressed for a picnic. I was wearing jeans, and they were cuffed. But the ladies made me sign a photo release, and then they asked me a bunch of questions mostly about my style icons and where my outfit came from. That was when I realized that it is actually possible to be embarrassed of wearing jeans and a t-shirt:

“Well, my jeans are Topshop, the blazer is secondhand from L.A., the top is Mads Norgard Copenhagen, the shoes are from Zurich Station, the bag is vintage Lancel from a Paris flea market, the sunglasses are secondhand from Brooklyn, and I made the jewelry myself from Victorian watch pieces, pearls and vintage chains…”

At this point, the nice Vogue interview lady started giving me a skeptical look, as though she suspected that I was taking the mickey and had just bought the whole thing from H&M last week.  And then she asked what I did for a living.

“Um,” I said, cringing, wishing the whole thing had never happened. “I’m a novelist?”

“Right,” she said, with this dubious little smile.

And that’s how I wound up on Vogue.com under the name “Robyn Schneide.”

The first time I saw this music video, I was in my friends’ living room in their little Hoxton house, too afraid to go back to my Brick Lane studio because it was filled with mice, and curled into a miserable huddle on their sofa as I had just, not ten minutes earlier, ended it with a boy over the telephone. The video cheered me up. Well, as much as anything can cheer up a girl in that situation. It’s the most stunning, quirky use of stop motion I’ve seen in a long time, and the lyrics are lovely:

Her Morning Elegance/Oren Lavie

What do you think? Isn’t it awesometastic?

So maybe I wasn’t being completely honest with you, even if I didn’t know it at the time. Give me a break, kids, I was in the dark about this one, too:

Apparently my toe is not broken.

But before you jump up and accuse me of being overly dramatic and crying curse where there clearly is none, I have an even more WTF injury than a plain ol’ broken toe: neuropraxia, or a condition in which a nerve remains in place after severe injury although it no longer transmits impulses, aka transient motor paralysis.

Um, okay.  I’ve paralyzed the nerves in my big toe, which wouldn’t be, you know, a big deal or anything if I was just planning to spend the next few weeks bumming around the house making floral arrangements, drinking Pimms, and re-reading Brideshead Revisited, but that’s not exactly the case.

In 48 hours, I leave for the south of France, because a bunch of us are going out to Cannes for the film festival, and we’re staying on a freaking yacht. Then a friend of mine has his first solo art exhibition God-knows-where in the Midlands, and then I have to go to New York to moderate a panel discussion at the BookExpo. So it would be helpful if I didn’t currently have nerve damage in my foot, the kind of nerve damage that prevents a person from being able to wear shoes.

That’s right. I am unable to shoe myself. Yesterday was the first day in which I managed to half-shove my foot into a slip-on Converse to go to the emergency room. Today I also managed to half-shod myself in same Converse and limp over to Oxford Circus with my housemate Mary in order to pick up some necessities for our Cannes trip.

We went to Primark. Now, I don’t know if you have ever been in a Primark before, but on the off chance that you haven’t, let me describe it to you: Picture the Bronx Target, the ridiculously busy one. Picture it on the Saturday afternoon before Christmas. Now picture all of the people on the packed red line train you had to take to get to the Bronx also crowding into said Target. Now picture the lines at the DMV. Congratulations, you have a complete mental image of what a random Wednesday afternoon is like at the Oxford Circus Primark.

Mary and I wandered around, picking up things we needed. For Mary, these things were pajamas.

“Look, Robyn, this one’s only £2!” It was a pair of pajama shorties covered in green anchors.

“Ah, dahling. You’ll look ravishing on the yacht wearing that one, I daresay,” said I, limping fetchingly through the crowded sleepwear aisle of the bargain superstore.

And so it went, sufficiently ridiculous, with me trying desperately to find a pair of throwaway flat shoes that I could wear until my nerve paralys–thingummy subsided. And then I spotted them: deck shoes, with white soles, the kind that those preppy St. A’s types were always wearing to class at my university, along with their bleeding madras (oh, sorry, that’s a Vampire Weekend song. Nevermind). Except, I actually needed these shoes, as the only shoes you can wear on this boat are deck shoes. At Primark, they were £6. And the line to pay for them was longer than my senior thesis.

There’s something vastly amusing about seriously shopping for boat shoes in Primark, where the sunglasses cost £1 and the line for the dressing rooms is over 100 people long. But then, there is something deeply depressing at how thrilled I was to be able to fit my swollen, sad little toe into said deck shoe–into anything that wasn’t my grody Converse. Nevertheless, I quite like my cheap, melancholy little boat shoes. I like what they represent: the absolute absurdity of my life.

Sometimes its yachts and parties, other times its emergency rooms and nerve damage, and still other times, it’s having a laugh in the boat shoe aisle of Primark. And, occasionally, it’s all of that at once.

Also, I kind of hate Primark. But I can’t help myself; that store is Recession Crack. I think I’m going back tomorrow for beach towels. And I’m sort of hoping they’re 99p.

Sorry for writing the title of this blog post in Engrish. I really have no idea why I’ve done that. Anyway. If you’ve been longing for a chance to see a bunch of fabulous authors (and also me) read from their (and also my) books, and if you’ve been meaning to mosey on down to the Jefferson Market Branch of the NYPL (and even if you haven’t), I’ve got an event for you!

FiveAwesomeYAFans, in association with Alley Of Books & Korianne Speaks
Presents:
NYC Teen Author Carnival
May 28th, 2009
4:00 – 6:00 PM
Jefferson Market Branch Library
425 Avenue of the Americas [at 10th St.], NYC

Authors:Lauren Barnholdt – Author of Two-way Street
Website / Twitter

Sarah MacLean – Author of The Season
Website / Twitter

Jessica Burkhart- Author of Canterwood Crest Series

Website / Twitter

Robyn Schneider – Author of Better Than Yesterday
Website / Twitter

Beckie Weinheimer – Author of Converting Kate
Website /Twitter

Melissa Walker – Author of Lovestruck Summer
Website / Twitter

Oh please, say you’ll be there! I might just possibly read a sneaky preview from Knightley Academy (which is coming out in March, did I mention? Yes, March. So maybe from that, but if not, I will read a deliciously awkward Charley-scene from Better Than Yesterday in my midatlantic accent and freak you all out to unspeakable levels of freak-outedness. Also, I will wear something ridiculous.)

Well. Despite the fact that half of my blog audience has apparently gotten here through some combination of googling Edward Cullen and Roald Dahl with no pants on, I’ve decided to dedicate this day’s post to a different–but nonetheless equally dapper–young gentleman: Chuck Bass.

Ah, Chuck: He of the expressively evil eyebrows, penchant for purple and preposterous ability to pull off paisley anything. I hate to admit it, but a tiny, terrible part of me has been in love with him since that early episode where he wore the infamous shark sweater:

And now I find out that I am not alone: There is an entire website dedicated to the Sartorial Awesome that is Chuck Bass.

The website, What Chuck Wore, which, by the way, is as shallow and fabulous as Mr. Bass himself, features Chuck’s best outfits from GossipGirl, complete with “commentary” from Mr. Bass himself.

Of course it isn’t real, but it’s fun to pretend. And damn is it a good way to waste 15 minutes when you’ve got work to avoid nothing else to do.

A favorite example from the site:

“Yes, I am wearing the leather gloves.  Yes, I am aware that they add a Patrick Bateman edge to the whole look.  I’m okay with that.  Do we have to go over who I am again?”

Go there now. Seriously, you won’t regret it.

(credits: Photo 1 via: Gossipgirlinsider, Photo 2 via: WhatChuckWore, Photo 3 via: Meesters, quoted text from WhatChuckWore)