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Sunday 18 April 2010

Getting snappy

So, hand in hand with writing books comes selling myself.  You, at the back, out, now!  And stop sniggering.

So.  Off we go for a day out to the local forest, armed with a daughter who took AS Photography, another daughter who likes having her picture taken, two dogs who don't care one way or the other about pictures but heard the word 'walk', me and my husband.

Now, I don't know about you (of course I don't, we've never been formally introduced and I've made it a policy to ignore all gossip unless it's really juicy) but I'm not a big fan of having my picture taken.  From the inside of my face I'm wrinkle-free, perky and tremendously attractive, BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT THE PICTURES SAY.  So, I am presented with a selection of photos in which I look like an elderly chipmunk.  With a squint.

I try lying down, standing up, pushing all the skin of my face to the back of my head with both hands and being photographed in near darkness, but all to no avail, I now look like an elderly chipmunk with a squint and some kind of attention deficit.  So I instruct daughter to keep snapping and I'll choose the best result.  One entire camera-full later, and I come up with a choice of two pictures... TWO!  One of which makes me look a bit.... senile, and in the other I have seventeen chins - and these are the best of the batch.

But, on the plus side, I do have lots (and lots) of nice pictures of everyone else.  Even the dogs, it turns out, are more photogenic than me.  Sigh.  So.  I e-mail my chosen picture off to Choc Lit on a Saturday night, on the grounds that, by the time someone opens the mail it will be Monday morning and everyone knows there's nothing worse than a Monday morning, except, it now turns out,  a Monday morning that has an unexpected picture of me in it.  So, I apologise in advance, Tom at Choc Lit.  Try to have an open mind and an empty stomach when you check tomorrow's e-mails, I find it helps.

This is what I ended up with:  I've made it small to protect you.


In other news - I've signed up for an OU course in archaeology and finished reading Space Captain Smith by Toby Frost (who I met at last week's York Festival of Writing).  Thoroughly recommended and very funny.  That's the book, not the archaeology course.  Archaeology is not noted for it's giggles.  So I'm going to come as a bit of a shock to them, as well.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great pic! Hope you are still on cloud 9... stay there for as long as poss.

Jane Lovering said...

The view from cloud 9 is fabulous! Enjoy LBF.

N.J.Walters said...

I think your picture is lovely!

I don't have an "official" author pic. lol I'm not fond of getting my picture taken either.

Nell Dixon said...

My pic looks as if I have a rhododendron flower growing out of my ear. My spanish publishers wanted one to put on the cover - hope they didn't choose that one. Yours looks lovely.

Dawn McClure said...

LOL Your post cracked me up this morning. I feel the same way about my pics. I think your pic looks awesome!

Have a great day. :)

Jane Lovering said...

Thanks NJ, Nell and Dawn. I think my problem is the discrepancy between the way I THINK I look and the way the camera says I actually DO look. They say the camera never lies, but I reckon it bends the truth quite a lot.