#portrait #phobia #hermit #MFRWauthor #MRWauthor
Hi Folks!
My latest short-blog entry is one I’m anxious to share, kind of like a support group, where you tell your story and others commiserate. I know I’m not alone in this “portrait torture.” Authors are reclusive by nature. We have to be. Stealing large chunks of alone-time is the only way we’re going to draft a novel.
And what happens when all you have to do is shuffle from your bed to the coffee pot to the computer? You do it without a thought to your outward appearance. In fact, when a story hijacks your brain and the “real” world ceases to exist, the only body you have is your fingers, flicking away on the keyboard.
Face? What writer has a face? There’s just a hole where you pour coffee into your bloodstream.
Then my publisher tells me I need to use an actual photograph of myself this time. No more hiding behind an avatar, no more biographies where I leave my readers imagining what I look like. Readers want to KNOW what I look like. I have no clue why. My face isn’t writing my stories, my brain is, and who wants to look at that squishy thing?
Well, I sucked it up and hired a photographer. Someone who makes a living forcing people into unnatural stances topped off with a grimace.
Okay, that’s just my opinion about how things went down. My photographer was a real trooper. She was a Picasso trying to paint with crayons, but she managed with a real smile on her face.
An eon, an epoch, and a dead dinosaur later, we were finished. I was alive. So was she, but just barely. I wasn’t an easy subject to work with. Not that I was a diva, but hell, my face does not do public.
At any rate, when my next novel, Love In Stone comes out May/June 2016, my mug will be on the back cover. Go check it out, if only to make that torture session worth it!
~S.C. Dane