“Striking Sparks” — Page Thirteen
CUT TO:
EXT. A SMALL AIRFIELD — DAY
Scene shift! New characters! Some of them intoxicated!
More below!
Bobservations
Overindulgence
Stretching yet another segue to the breaking point, I will briefly mention that I am having some of my early pulp/hard-boiled detective novels re-released through Amazon, and you may be sure I’ll be plugging them when they are actually available. That’s some time off, however. The significance of the above header (aside from the overserved nature of the parties illustrated in the comic) is that one of the things I was asked to provide was a Photo Of The Author.
Well.
You have no idea what absurd extremes an author’s vanity can attain until said author is asked to provide a photo of themselves. Especially when there is no budget for a professional photographer to reign in the rampaging ego, so the author is essentially relegated to “selfies.”
Naturally, as an author, your imagination gets the better of you for a while. At first you are thinking a wild, windswept moor, with yourself in a jacket with the collar turned up; smoking a pipe even though you don’t smoke; and, naturally, gazing pensively into the cloud-strewn distance. The lack of local moors causes you to shelve this concept, however.
Then, since it is a detective novel, you muse on the trenchcoat-and-fedora idea. You actually have a trenchcoat, though you are not sure where it is and it probably doesn’t fit. However, even if you had all the props this would be obvious cosplay and frankly just setting yourself up for “Mary Sue” accusations.
So you reluctantly surrender to reality and just take a few selfies. And by “a few” I mean “about six hundred and seventy.” You discover that if you shoot from too low it makes you look fat and if you shoot from too high the receding hairline is a little bit prominent. Staring at the LCD screen makes you look stoned, looking square into the lens looks like a mug shot, and you can never quite figure out what to do with your hands.
Thank God you’re not paying to develop film these days.
But eventually you get about five or six that you like. If you are male, you like the ones that make you look (in your opinion) tough and cool. And you are just selecting the best of these to upload when your wife comes home from work and insists that the pictures you chose make you look “mean.” She prefers one of the rejects where you are smiling.
This leads to a spirited argument that eventually culminates in what is known as a “marital compromise.” And thus you send off the Author’s Photo.
The smiling one.
— Bob out
oh boy, it’s gonna be an airborne crisis, this time. and the pilot’s in on it.
You missed the obvious method: You should have posted the top Author Selfie Photo choices here for us to vote on. As a bunch of random strangers on the internet, our opinions are invariably infallible!
Butt off coarse there unflappable.
This comment is just too funny. :L
…I just noticed this comic has alt text. Now I have to archive binge and hover my mouse over every page. You bastards.
MUAHAHAHAHA!
Okay, caught up in all sense of the word. Now, how do I format my comments to get italics, bold, underline, etc?
I think this page has the simplest examples:
http://flash.uvm.edu/annrpt/boldital.htm
We mods have our own controls inside WP.
But I’m on my phone 🙁 No alt text for me.
Bob, I agree with your decision to avoid the Mary Sue accusations that would come from a detective cosplay picture. But I think deliberately making your detective book author picture look like a mug shot – complete with holding up a number – would be funny.
Barring that, I would definitely go with the “pensive author out on the moors” idea. I’m not even an author, and that’s still how I picture myself. There may not be any moors in your area, but don’t you have son who is a whiz at Photoshop? That and Google Image Search are all you should need.
What actually happens is that I become fixated on the discovery that my eyeballs are obviously misaligned. The longer I stare at the pictures the more I become convinced I look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Assuming that all goes well with the publishing, there will be an Author’s Page I will link to and everyone can have fun at my expense at that time. 🙂
??? we already do.
I’ve been to Chatsworth. That’s the closest to moors you’ll get in Califrisky. Don’t forget the deerstalker cap — that would be a hoot. ; )