Not by the hair... -- Jay

It's all about timing.

My chin has been covered up by either a goatee or a beard for nine years and I was beginning to miss that patch o' skin. But when you're an obsessive person, you think about way too many details before you do anything drastic. For example, what if I make a book-related appearance and no one recognizes me because I don't look like my author photo? (I know, I know, it's just a few square-inches of hair. It's not like I used a photo from twenty years ago...like some people!) Or what if eight years without sunlight makes it look like I painted my chin with Wite-Out?

So I put it off till there was a big gap between scheduled book events.

A couple Sundays ago, I sat on a panel with author Ron Koertge to discuss intellectual freedom and censorship in front of an audience of California teachers and librarians. The basic idea we were trying to get across is that censorship $%@&in' sucks! The next day I did my second book signing at Vroman's Bookstore. But this time, I teamed up with Jordanna Fraiberg, a fellow Razorbill author. Her debut teen novel, In Your Room, is a very fun and well-written love story that you absolutely must check out. For more info and pics of that event (including the last known photo of my pre-exposed chin), check out the blogs of Paula Yoo and Lisa Yee.

With those two bookish events concluded, my calendar was free till the end of January...which is plenty of time to cover my chin again if needed.

So my only other concern before shaving was whether or not the color of my chin would match the skin nearby it. And since the vampire look is in right now, no one seemed to notice when I let my never-very-present-anyway tan fade away from the rest of my face.

So out came the clippers and the razor.

And now, introducing, for the first time in nearly a decade...my chin!


- Jay