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.