AUTHOR PHOTO 101 | 5 Reasons I’m Not a Model (Besides the Obvious)

contact_sheetLast month, I rallied myself and three dear friends for an author photo shoot. For weeks, I’d been dreading it yet looking forward to ticking the task off my to-do list. I engaged the girly-girl talents of K and C to do my hair and makeup.

One peek at myself with makeup on, and I couldn’t believe it. I looked damned good. I couldn’t help but lament my cluelessness all these years and vowed to start wearing a little eyeliner and mascara at the very least. Lesson learned: primer coats don’t only apply to house painting.

J, the photographer, sported a camera with a portrait lens about two feet long. Poor guy had to contend with 90-plus degree heat (the hottest weekend this year as luck would have it) and me jabbering and fooling around. We were lucky to get a good image before my makeup started melting.

By the end of the day, I discovered that even if I were 16 and a raging ectomorph, I could never be a model because:

1. I don’t take direction well. I don’t know how many times J told me to hold still and stop talking. The photo session brought out my inner six year old.

2. I goof off too much. Come to find out that I haven’t outgrown my tendency to ham it up. This, too, is a leftover from my girlhood. But hamming it up does not a good model make.

Now this is slouching!
Now this is slouching!

3. I don’t get makeup. After the primer coat, K put about five other layers of “naturalistic” makeup on me. She called her brush strokes “shading,” “contouring,” and good old “masking,” which was a nice way of saying hiding the purple shadows beneath my eyes. Don’t ask me what she did with eyeshadow. All I know it that my image in the mirror showed a woman with gynormous, popping-out-of-my-head blue eyes. Even the photographer said, “Whoa.”

4. I don’t slouch becomingly. When a model slouches, she may look like a contorted preying mantis, but she’s a bloody gorgeous, avant garde preying mantis. I just look like I’ve got scoliosis and no neck.

5. I refuse to take off my glasses. I like my glasses, but high fashion they are not.

Drum roll, please…Here’s the winning photo that will appear on my cover jacket!

Lisa_new_edit_color

WRITING CREEPY | A Ghost Story Weekend

Come to find out that writing creepy is hard! I’d arrived at Ghost Story Weekend without an idea, thinking no biggie, something will come, it always does. On Friday night when most of the other 12 writers at the retreat tapped away, tap-tap-tap, on their short stories, and with only 24 hours to write a first draft, I found myself doing the Jack Nicholson:

“…I don’t know what to write I don’t know what to write. Image of a girl walking her dog…so stupid with no other character on the scene. But maybe the people in the houses — the people she sees through the windows are the creep-factors. Stepford-wife-like neighborhoods are creepy. So what would this girl be — blah! I don’t have an idea I don’t know what to write I don’t know what to write…”

About half of us sat in the haunted boathouse while the others wrote in the bungalows. When we’d met with our hostess, novelist Elizabeth Engstrom, earlier in the evening, I’d noticed that most of my fellow crazy people looked confident. Even the few who’d arrived without a story idea looked confident that they’d find and finish their stories. For some reason, I was stuck on the word “creepy.”

I wasn’t in a creepy mood. I was having too much fun reunionizing and meeting people, enjoying the unusually warm weather, relishing the time away from my moronic downstairs neighbors, and drinking red wine. If anything, I was in a sarcastic mood. I kept hearing a flippant little first-person voice poking fun at everything ghostly.

But…I was also torturing myself in classic writerly fashion: I must give creepy a try.

Saturday dawned cloudy with wind enough to stir Siltcoos Lake and set the boathouse to swaying. I had nothing. No revelations in the night despite the index cards and pen sitting next to my pillow. EFF-this, I thought, I’m going with my sarcastic voice. As long as my story contains some species of ghostly phenomena, I’m golden.

Then, what do you know, I had a blast writing my story. Now my desperation was all about finishing the draft by 6:00 p.m. that evening. I started with a voice and a setting — plus something to poke fun at: ghost hunters. Didn’t know where it was going, how to end it, or what the point of the whole thing was. After awhile, I didn’t care, and, in the end, I even managed a little creepiness.

Lessons learned or relearned?

1. Jump in, the story will follow. Sometimes it’s best not to think too hard about it.

2. Go with the voice in my head that’s yelling the loudest.

3. Creepiness comes when you least expect it.

Particularities and Perseverence

I wanna go back to sleep SO bad!

On Friday I wrote that I was seeking something in my life, and I wondered what this meant for my fiction. I didn’t mean that I was going to quit. I meant that I need to branch out and explore other areas of my being-ness. I’ve had one egg (fiction)  in my basket for quite awhile now.

However, that said, today I promised myself I’d start writing on yet another new novel idea. Last fall I started a thriller, took a workshop, and lost interest in the story. Hard-core thrillers aren’t my thing, that’s all. But I wanted to check out that kind of storytelling, and I’m glad I did.

Now, it’s time to start again. I’ve muddled a new idea, and, of course, I’m unsure about it. Over the weekend, I realized — RE-realized I should say — that after awhile I tie myself in knots with too much thinking. I’m better in the doing. The only way to know whether I’m emotionally invested is to write the first 50 pages fast, which is to say, with minimal angst.

Being a detail-oriented person, I find it’s the particularites set down on the page that get me excited. The grand story vision is an untested theory, that’s all. So I’ll see what I see after 50 pages.

I’m sitting up in bed with coffee, laptop, index cards, and novel journal (plus cat) at my side. Please wish me luck: I’m exhausted and anxious. I haven’t been sleeping well because of money stress. That’s why I’m still in bed; sitting at my desk to write would take too much energy. This, my friends, is perseverence in action!

A Day of Rest

This cat could teach me a thing or two.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of the sabbath. The day of rest. I mean a true day of rest, in which we live outside our hectic notions of time. No errand running, no catch-up work, no nothing. Just relaxation, friends, family, eating (of course!), and your church of choice, whether that’s a cathedral or a forest.

If I understand the traditional intent, we’d devote our sabbath days to our spiritual selves. But how to take ourselves out of the daily grind for one day? Each week, we’d have to plan for our personal sabbaths as if going on a one-day vacation from our lives. We’d have to say “no.” We’d try to avoid the easy time-wasters and brain-pacifiers: television, Internet, email, and maybe even novels. (Oh–the last one would be my downfall in a restless moment!)

I’d probably nap during the afternoon and call this a form of contemplation. For reflection time, I could journal. I’d walk as a form of meditation.

Hmm…

What about fiction writing? For the longest time, I thought of fiction as my religion. It was the way I connected to my core self and to the bigger universal dealio, whatever that may be, because I sure as heck don’t know. Maybe without knowing it, I’ve been looking for this dealio through my fiction.

All I know is that when I started taking my fiction seriously, I stopped seeking a spiritual path in the more traditional sense.

I seem to be in seeker mode again though. I wonder what this means for my fiction…

This Is my Big Toe

Well, hi there after so long. I feel like I’m venturing into a cozy room after wandering an outer darkness for awhile. My room is a parlor with striped wallpaper and fringed lamps, and it contains a roaring fire and dozens shabby, genteel wingback chairs. In those wingback chairs lounge virtual blog friends of times past. You, my blog friends, are ghostly as yet — but welcoming — and my chair sits in the middle of everyone, already warmed by the fire.

This is my big toe venturing back into blog-world. It needs a little warming up, so I shall stretch it toward the hearth by way of 2010 photos.

Hey, how are you? Drop a line, let me know.

January: Hanalei Bay, Hawaii! Vitamin D! Lots of mai tais!
February: Early spring
March: Oregon coast for one of my impromptu writers retreats
One-eyed doggy a-okay
Happy Easter

The Autumn of My Discontent, Revised

Autumn Leaves

Addendum: For the first time, I’m revising one of my blog posts. It struck me a few hours after writing this post (now cut drastically) that I’ve had a tough year. If I’m a little down, well, okay. Well, not really okay, but all-righty then. I do know that I haven’t accomplished much fiction this year. I’m heartsick about this, true, and I’ve been up-and-down all year, but am I certifiably depressed? Maybe not. Maybe it’s just a mid-life crisis. I can live with that. For now.

I’m here, but not here. Writing, but not really. Keeping it together, but barely. Fighting off the gray weight takes a lot of energy. I only have so much energy to go around, so when I’m struggling mightily on that front, I, simply put, write less.

Excess brain noise fouls me up at times like this. So, when I’m sitting at my computer, page open, character ready to do her thing, somehow…I’m not sure. I have a harder time sinking into the fictional world. Each. Word. Is. Like. This. In the background, my brain-gears grind in an endless, annoying, disillusioned mutter. You know when your computer churns away on a task (you know what I’m talking about if you own a PC that’s got a virus or two or two dozen lurking within it) and slows way down? It’s like that. Kind of.

So what do I do? I keep up with as many of my writing habits as possible while dropping tasks such as housecleaning. I turn on the computer first thing in the morning. I take my laptop to coffeehouses. I think about the current project as I’m drifting to sleep and when I wake up. I remind myself that I’m a good writer and that whatever problems I’m encountering with plot or characterization or internal logic or point of view is as normal as can be, not a sign that I’m never going to get published.

(Okay, that’s more like it. Pisser of a life juncture — especially with regards to my writing progress — but I’ll hold off announcing that I’m certifiably depressed until some other time.)

Channeling Novelist Diana Abu-Jaber

Current mood: prickly
Current mood: prickly

I’m highly frustrated right now. I’m supposed to be having fun, experimenting, if you will, with a thriller-ish kind of story so I can improve my plotting and pacing skills. Well this you-know-what’s hard!

I feel like I don’t know anything anymore. Maybe I haven’t mastered as much writing craft as I thought, and I’m telling you, I’m about to throw this lousy thing out, give up, go back to wallowing in all my bad writing habits because at least I was having fun.

It’s interesting because by concentrating on plot/pacing, character automatically takes a backseat. I’m a character gal. I get all inside their heads, so looking at story from a different perspective is whacking out my brain. And I know I might receive comments that both character and plot are important. But of course — but, you see, I’m focusing on plot right now.

I’m reminded of novelist Diana Abu-Jaber. She’s one of those gorgeous, plotless writers. Her prose is full of every kind of sensory description, especially when it comes to food. Crescent is one of my favorite novels simply for its loveliness.

A few years back I heard her speak at a literary festival. She’d recently come out with a — GASP! — mystery. Yee gads. This fascinated me. I read the novel beforehand, and the gorgeous writing was still there (so it was a literary mystery), but so was the suspense. That is to say: the plot.

Here’s what she had to say about her genre switch:

“If you want to learn plot, write a thriller or a mystery.”

“I really needed to get me one to those things — a plot.”

She said she started out with a snobbish attitude, like it would be so easy — it’s just a mystery, right? She tried everything, and her editor kept sending back the manuscript with notes like, “Make it better.” She had to learn how to plant clues, build suspense, and create a great villain. She said that at one point her editor reminded her that we’re not supposed to know who the villain is until the end of the story. She said it was HARD and that now she has the utmost respect for thriller/mystery writers.

From a craft perspective, she started over. But she did it. And if she can do it, so can I. So now I’m channeling Diana Abu-Jaber in hopes that some of her patience will rub off on me. Because I am losing patience. With myself, with the process, with the story itself…sigh…

I Swear I’m Working!

I call  this doing the Hemingway.
I call this doing the Hemingway.

Need I say anything more on a glorious TGIF afternoon, lounging in my favorite open-air bistro, Capitol Hill Coffee House, and starting the development process for Act II?

Floating out there beyond the headlights awaits the plot point that signals the end of Act II. I know where I’m going, just need to get a handle on the scenes that get me from here to there.

Admittedly, this kind of planning work isn’t my strength. A nice little Chilean Merlot helps though!

Can we just go home now?
Can we just go home now?

My Messy Office

Is there a desk under there?
Is there a desk under there?

Just finished writing a short scene, and was about to start the next, when I made the mistake of gazing around my inner sanctum. Bad mistake — now I’m distracted by the mess. Over the past few weeks I’ve accomplished new heights of domestic godliness in all rooms except this one. I scrubbed, dusted, organized, vacuumed, and even carpet-cleaned. (Yes, I rented an actual machine.)

Except for the rugs, my industrious spurt did not extend to the office. The cleaning task is a burning imperative at this point. Unfortunately, I’m intimidated by my paper piles. Too many of them, and — I cheated! —

Sacrilege! A migrated paper pile atop my beloved dictionary!
Sacrilege! A migrated paper pile atop my beloved dictionary!

some of them migrated here from other rooms during the Big Clean.

Nothing to do but take my laptop to a coffeehouse, I think. This IS a holiday weekend, after all.

How many old manuscripts do I need, anyhow?
How many old manuscripts do I need, anyhow?
And while I'm at it, I'd better dust too...
And while I'm at it, I'd better dust too...

Started the New Novel!

Current mood: content
Current mood: content

And it wasn’t as traumatic as all that. In fact, it felt natural, and as soon as I began writing, my anxiety drained away. Finished the first scene, and I’m okay with it for now. Gets me started.

However, I can’t help but wonder if I’ll ever be able to write “fast.” As in fast-paced…One of the things I’m doing differently this time is concentrating on suspense. As in, I’m going to write a suspense novel. I’m going to focus on pacing and plot. I’m going to have fun with it.

So, what do I do? Write a first scene that’s kinda quiet. I couldn’t write one of those wham-bam novels if I tried. And I am trying…I re-read the scene several times, feeling the usual self-doubt, but still overall, pleased at having started.

One thing I know about myself: I think symbolically, so without realizing it or particularly trying, I’ll have described something in the setting — for example, Christmas lights — and I’ll have described these lights in a way that illustrates my character’s mood, and then maybe a string flickers out, furthering the mood, inciting the character to reflect (but not for too long) on something…

Does that sound fast-paced to you?

Definitely not wham-bam, but, on the other hand, did I accomplish my first-scene goals? Grab quickly? Introduce an intriguing main character in conflict? End on an open-ended note? Introduce elements that will echo later?

I think so — I hope so. I guess we’ll see!

Lesson of the day: Accept my writing style while improving on my weaknesses.