So here it is, the photograph that will be splashed across the big screen at the Romance Writers of America® conference in July. I’m told it’s a good picture. See “Author photo? Ack!” below for how I feel about it.
The nose is really more Mr. Potato Head than Quasimodo, though.
Me
The Hero’s Journey has been the preferred story map ever since Christopher Vogler’s memo interpreting Joseph Campbell’s work for writers first made the rounds at Disney. I’ve never found it easy to fit my stories to that map. That left me feeling, well, dumb.
If you’ve struggled with the Hero’s Journey, there’s now an alternative, The Virgin’s Promise, which Kim Hudson describes as a journey of self-fulfillment in movies as diverse as The Other Boleyn Girl, Brokeback Mountain, Billy Elliot, Tootsie, and Wedding Crashers. In a nifty article from The Writer’s Store web site, Hudson compares the Virgin’s Promise to the Hero’s Journey and lays out the thirteen beats of the Virgin’s journey.
Now, I wonder if I can use it to rewrite my first book.
Kim Hudson
As the euphoria over being a Golden Heart® finalist settles into a quiet joy, reality intrudes. RWA® wants an author photograph. At the July 31st ceremony, they will project this photo on the biggest screen you have ever seen in your life. A screen so ginormous that it will make the one at the new $1.2 billion Cowboys stadium in Dallas look piddly.
Well, maybe not quite, but it will seem that way to all of us with our faces splashed up there.
Having my photograph taken is one of my least favorite things. Most of the time, I think pictures of me look more like Charles Laughton in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” So, when I get one I like, I hang on to it. Forever. For example, I’m very fond of the picture that I use on this website (see About Me). When the time comes, I figured it could go on book jackets, bookmarks, and whatever other authory things I need. But it’s black and white, and RWA® wants color. Drat!
Fortunately, my brilliant graphic designer husband is also a photographer. This afternoon, we’ll totter off to the botanic garden and another site or two so he can take a few thousand shots in hopes that one of them will be reasonably suitable for appearing a million times life size.
Jumbotron+Me=Nerves
Should you be in search of tips on avoiding the cheesy author portrait yourself, here’s advice from Author Tech Tips, a cool website with all kinds of, um, tips about using technology to promote your books and yourself.
Today is the day that RITA® and Golden Heart® hopefuls wait to hear if their books are finalists. You have it in the back of your mind all day that any minute your phone will ring, and someone from Romance Writers of America® will be on the line telling you that you’re one of the chosen.
Well, guess what? I am. I just got off the phone with an RWA® board member, and FORTUNE’S FOOL is a finalist in the Golden Heart® Romantic Elements category. Thank you, RWA®!
I don’t know about you, but when I think about e.e. cummings–and I do think about him from time to time–his humorous poems spring to mind. Today, my buddy Michelle McGinnis posted this beautiful sonnet to her blog, The Gladdest Thing. Thank you, Michelle, for reminding me that e.e. was a man of many gifts.
being to timelessness as it’s to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land
(do lovers suffer? all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad? only their smallest joy’s
a universe emerging from a wish)
love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star
—do lovers love? why then to heaven with hell.
Whatever sages say and fools, all’s well
— e.e. cummings
Michelle posts poems regularly. At her website, you can sign up for email that delivers them straight to your mailbox. I’m always meaning to read more poetry and am glad to have someone send it my way. Or is that gladdest?
I love the whole idea of using myth and fairy tales in books and movies, even when the writer may be doing it unconsciously. Here’s a great post by Alexandra Sokoloff on Murderati talking about some of the more familiar fairy tale structures. Reading it, I had a epiphany about my next script, which I’ll draft during ScriptFrenzy in April. And I saw a new angle on the novel I’m revising now.
As an organic writer who often struggles with structure, I gotta love it!
Yesterday, Robert Parker–he of Spenser fame–died at his desk, at work on a book. Isn’t that the way a writer should go?
Spenser is the kind of guy I’d like to know. Smart, tough, accomplished. It seems that’s the kind of guy Robert B. Parker was, too. We’re lucky we get to know him a little through his books.
Parker was 77 and the author of more than 60 books. The New York Times obituary reports the cause of death as a heart attack. I hope it was quick and clean and that Parker, absorbed in that novel in front of him, never knew what hit him.
RIP.
The lovely and talented Emily McKay, who is up for a 2010 Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times, has a Silhouette Desire Online Read up now, and it’s free. Her Boss’s Private Affair is just the thing if you want to add a little spice to your holidays.
Did I mention that it’s free?
Emily McKay
I’m not really a photography expert, but I know what I like, and if you ask me, there’s a lot to love in this shot of Elijah Wood from the September cover of H magazine. Like a great story, it’s got tone, mood, character, texture, lighting. And face it, people, Wood is just plain gorgeous here.
In my past life as a magazine editor, when I assigned a photographer to a story, I told him what it was about and suggested what might work, but, ultimately, I trusted his artist’s eye. Sometimes, I traveled on assignment and had to be both writer and photographer. Each time I clicked the shutter, I prayed that eye would be there for me.
When proof sheets came in, I poured over them, searching for that one shot that supported the story visually and told its own even if you never read a word of the copy. Sometimes it took a whole roll of film or five or ten to get just the right one. But as they say, film is cheap, but the perfect picture is a pearl beyond price.
I gotta hand it to the photographer here. She’s got the eye. Or he does. Whoever. It’s beautiful.
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