Dressing for Author Success?

“This is how I dress for success! Argh!” Not Someone You Want To meet In A Dark Forest At Night…
Better RUN!
Texas Renaissance Festival, Todd Mission, Texas Copyright by WyoJones. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

I saw a funny meme on Facebook about dressing for the job you want. The image with it was a guy dressed as Batman. It made me smile, but also made me think. I know our brains are powerful. They can deliver us places we didn’t think we wanted to go. Or places we didn’t want to be but we didn’t tell our brains, so there were are. Where we didn’t want.

I seriously try not to think, “If I do xx, then xxx will happen.” I think my brain delights in delivering xxx. My brain and I, we have a kind of love/hate relationship. Obviously we need each other for, you know, existing, but we don’t always like each other.

At the risk of launching a hosing-by-brain, that meme got me thinking about what should I be wearing for my job. I wonder if what I wear make me a more effective author? Do I need to step up from the knit pants to, I don’t know, something more author-ish?

And what would that be?

Copyright by WyoJones. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

What do authors wear, I mean, the really, really famous ones? When they pose in their photos for interviews in magazines and on HGTV, are they wearing their actual working clothes or just putting on the glitz for the camera?

The hubs and I did some house hunting the last couple of years or so. It was going to be the grandma-dream-retirement-author home. That was a lot of pressure for one house and in the end, I realized that the house I imagined being creative in, was not a house the when-I-am-not-writing me would be comfortable living in.

I’m kind of the same way about clothes. I don’t know if wearing comfortable clothes (that are sometimes pajamas) keeps me from being a World Famous Author. I do know that with every year that I get older, my need for comfort increases. There is probably an equation for it and if I made up my math like I do my science, I’d add it right here; [   ]  But I don’t mess with math any more than I can help. (But feel free to fill in the blank if you are math inclined.)

So…clothes. Comfortable shoes came first, edging out the sassy heels. Then came shirts that let me breathe in and out. You know, get that air that is also so crucial to existing (at least I think I still breathe even though I died in 1999. It feels like I do.)? The knit pants, well, I gave in on that this spring. They are just SO comfortable. If gravity didn’t have such a tight grip on me, I’d do cartwheels or something from sheer relief. I can sit. I can stand. I can bend. I can sit some more. I can sit a lot, before and after food.

I love these pants.

I tried to wear some of my “comfortable” jeans the other day. I mean, they have spandex and some other cool comfort-inducing stuff, woven into them and last year they felt comfortable. At least, I believed they were (hmmm, is my brain messing with me?). So I put them on and I felt like I was getting cut in half by noon. It was sad, because they were sassy and they did some gravitational push back.

Oh well. Can’t fight gravity.

So, here’s my Monday question: what job do you dress for? Do think there is an “author uniform?” Would it make me a better writer if I wore it?

You know I love comments so much that I pick a favorite to receive my monthly AnaBanana gift basket ($25 value).  Recipient is announced the first blog post of the new month. And speaking of the heat, turn on an audio book! This month, I’m  participating in #AugustAudio with some other authors. Follow the hashtag and check here each Friday (for winners list) and Saturday (to find out new giveaway) in August if you’d like to try to score a book listen!

Perilously yours,

Pauline

P.S. So, in The Last Enemy, Dani is a romance author and she gets teased about needing a boa to write. For the record, I don’t own a boa, but I’m also not as famous as Dani is in the book. Hmmm….

Well, while I ponder the boa, hope you’ll check out The Last Enemy. It’s free all the time and you can get the audio book for $1.99 if grab the free digital edition first.