Prepping for RWA National Conference: Shopping, Neither For Fun nor Frivolous

Two weeks from tomorrow I fly out to Anaheim with two good friends and writing cohorts For RWA’s (Romance Writers of America) national conference.

Any one who’s gone to a professional conference knows, there’s a great deal of preparation involved. You need to make travel arrangements, research a layout of the land so you can maneuver the area and that’s just the beginning.

For conferences like RWA, it could mean having to craft your pitches for editors and agents. Reviewing the list of workshops being offered is another big task that can eat up your time.

But for my friends and I, there was one important task left undone, that we just needed to attend to this past weekend: The shopping trip.

Those of you lucky readers who know us have heard tales of last year’s never-ending shopping trips in preparation for conference. As a favor to our sanity (and our pocketbooks) we promised only one trip this year, for just a couple of essential items. (okay…so some of us bargained up from our original deal of no shopping trip to one.)

While some of you may be saying this is the frivolous side or the fun side, I would have to disagree.

I’ll address the fun side first.

While I love spending time with my friends and we can turn any situation into a good time, looking for clothes is not fun for me.

For example: One of the items on my shopping list was a skirt that was not black (like every other skirt I own.) Easy enough, you might say. It’s summer, there must be lost of bright and bold colors on the racks. You would be right. And quite a few light, airy fabrics in beautiful neutral tones too. I had no problem finding skirts I liked, what I did have problems with was finding one that looked okay on me given my short height.

At five foot two, most skirts don’t fall on me the way they are intended to. Designed to hit just below the knee? On me it’s mid-calf. A lovely mid-calf gauze skirt drags the floor o. And it’s just not about the length, it becomes about the way it’s cut to be through the hips. It’s exhausting to find one that looks like it was intended (But I did eventually succeed… x2 !)

So what about the idea that it’s frivolous?

You might have a better argument here.  I probably could string together enough clothes in my wardrobe for four professional outfits. And for the most part I will be depending on my current wardrobe, but I maintain that those couple of new items I bought, serve as a boost to the self-confidence. When a person feels good about what they are wearing, and they are dressed as a professional, acting like a pro begins to come naturally.

The low-cost of one or two items (Especially when you hit the sales racks) is worth the self confidence boost.

Besides…walking around the mall is great exercise to ensure that those current clothing selections fit the way we want to.

Over the next two weeks, I will be sharing posts about how I prep for a national conference. The week of July 23 - 27, I will be at conference and I will be re-running some of my favorite posts as well as articles I have written for Blogcritics.org and Blinded by Sound.