Monthly Archives: February 2016

How to Take the Best Author Photo This Miserable World Has Ever Seen

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When you write a book, people will want to know what your face looks like. I don’t know why, but it’s true. Maybe the reading public has been burned one too many times by the Carolyn Keenes of the world and needs reassurance that you’re not secretly a conglomerate of underpaid ghostwriters, or maybe they want to scan your forehead for telltale talent bumps in a kind of 2-D phrenological exam. Either way, a headshot must be taken.

Step 0: Eliminate all the pictures of your face that you CANNOT use.
It’s the new millennium, which means that in addition to wearing unisex silver leotards and commuting to work in pneumatic tubes, every person on earth has a digital repository of face-photos somewhere. Don’t believe me? Just tap into your phone’s “Selfies” folder:

File Feb 22, 3 09 52 PM

In a word: barf city!!! (Okay, that’s two words.) Still–these are all terrible and will not do. A snapshot of yourself with stick-uppy purple hair and sunglasses you took in the front seat of your Volvo 240 while stuck in traffic on the way to a Christopher Moore signing does NOT a professional headshot make.

 

Step 1: Identify all of your flaws.
This should be very easy. In my case, we have the following issues:

flaws

Intractable hairline cowlick (A)
Bald eyebrow spot, here filled in with makeup (B)
Nose that appears strangely flat in profile (C)

Gross! Now, short of a head transplant, there’s really nothing you can do to FIX these, but you CAN dwell upon them obsessively and try to hold your face in a strange rictus that obscures all flaws from view at once. Practice in the mirror.

Step 2: Know somebody who owns a camera.
Ideally this is a friend of yours. If you do not have a friend with a camera, you will have to pay someone with a camera to be your friend for the afternoon. No, I don’t know how much it should cost—three thousand dollars? That sounds about right, right? All that flash powder and developing fluid adds up, surely.

Step 3: Pick an authoritative background.
Put the “author” in “authoritative” by insisting on posing in front of bookshelves. If there is no bookshelf in your photo, people will forget that you are a writer or even that they are holding a book at all! Don’t let this happen. Even if the shelf is full of something like the complete 1982 Encyclopedia Britannica or a bunch of Goosebumps books, it will lend you gravitas. “Yes,” a full bookshelf says. “She has scanned her authorly eyeballs over all of us, and drunk in the knowledge imparted on our pages. She is therefore wise, and her book is sure to be a good one worth at least $17.99 plus tax where applicable.”

Step 4: Dress appropriately.
Pick a power outfit that says something like “I’m sexily intelligent, or intelligently sexy, but I could also kill you with my bare hands OR go onstage to accept my National Book Award, all in this same multipurpose sensible ensemble.” Also no loud prints or pastels.

Step 5: Have somebody else paint your face normal colors.
Your face probably has a lot of problems (see step 1) so this is a good opportunity to pay someone to lacquer it up with skin-colored goop so that no one can see your pores or even your nose-holes. Unsure of what to ask of your maquillagiste*? Ask for “the regular human face.” She’ll know what it means.

*Not a real French word

Step 6: Drench yourself in glorious light.
The sun doesn’t count, and neither does your novelty leg lamp. If your camera-friend is worth his or her salt, he or she should have one of those upside-down umbrellas with a light in it and also something called a “B light.” Also, if you’re a woman, you should be backlit so that your hair lights up around your head like a nimbus of gold.

Step 7: Pose.
Under no circumstances should you hold your body the way your ordinarily do, you slob. Pretend an invisible string is pulling up the top of your head. Pretend another invisible string is pulling up each of your shoulders and elbows. Now dance! Ha ha, I made you a marionette.

But seriously. Here are some classic looks for an author:
Crossed arms
Crossed arms with chin on fist
Crossed arms with chin on fist and one finger delicately raised against one’s cheek, as if to say “tee hee, what a fascinatingly bestsellery book idea I’ve just had”
Hands on hips
Whoa, not so aggressive! Hands GENTLY on hips
Fingers hooked weirdly into front pockets
Casually leaning against brick wall
Lying on chaise longue, one arm flung over eyes
Aggressively pointing at camera while mouthing “YOU, YES YOU, BUY MY BOOK”
Exaggerated wink/thumbs-up combo

Step 8: Shoot!
Once you’ve picked some poses, just sit back*, relax**, and let the camera do its magic!

*Do not sit back.
**Do not relax.

Soon you will have a bevy of appropriate and flattering shots to choose from, such as:

Outtakes and Dog Photos 8

What

Outtakes and Dog Photos 12

DEMONS

Outtakes and Dog Photos 15

what are you doing DON’T DO THAT

Step 9: Despair.
God, what were you THINKING, trying to take a photo of your face? This is worse than school picture day and a dentist’s appointment mashed together! Brainstorm alternatives: maybe your publisher will accept an oil painting of your face, or that caricature of you and your dog you paid $20 for in the seventh grade? Maybe you can claim you’re in the witness protection program, except then what if your publisher calls your bluff by offering to pay for plastic surgery to distance you and your young adult romantic comedy from your crime-filled past as a bookie? Look enviously at your dog, who is lying on the ground, dead asleep, and does not have to worry about things like getting his picture taken, because he barely understands how a mirror works, let alone a three-jillion gigapixel DSLR with wide-angle lens.

Step 10: Take a picture of your dog instead.

WHO'S A GOOD BOY?????

Perfect. They’ll never know the difference.

How to Survive February

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This weekend, I attended my friend Eli’s annual Christmas in February party. Why Christmas in February? Because whoever planned Christmas Classic™ severely underestimated when humanity would need its ultra-dose of cheer and goodwill to get through the winter. It’s like when everyone was calling the Lindbergh babynapping the “crime of the century”even though it only happened less than a third of the way through said century. The hubris! Save some crime for the remaining 68 years!

Anyway, Christmas should be in February, because February is an endless grind of shuffling days and toss-turning nights and waking up thinking “well, I guess I’m alive.” February is so bleak that merely existing causes a deep ache in your body and/or soul. Snow has lost its luster. Boots have lost their tread. You, perhaps, have lost your will to persevere into March.

SickBedPannellBarnardCabPhoto001

Pictured: your state of mind

But February can be endured. Even in a year like 2016 where some wily trickster has snuck in an extra day of bluster and misery, you are equal to the task of not succumbing to it. How? With these tried-and-true lifestyle tips from me, a person who has made it through 26 and a half of these bad boys.

Light some candles and draw a hot bath with calming essential oils like lavender or peppermint. Get in the tub, then submerge your whole head. The water will muffle your screams of desperation.

Get some exercise. Exercise is terrible and ordinarily you should never have to do it, but in February I give you permission to do like many a women’s magazine has suggested and “work exercise into your everyday activities.” For example: when you tumble off the couch in a post-nap fog of despair, do a push-up before righting yourself.

Touch a living thing. It CAN be something like your Christmas Amaryllis or the pantry moth you finally manage to squash between your palms, but best practice is something with fur, like a dog or cat or friendly opossum. This will produce a hormone called “oxycontin” or something and your synapses will explode with pleasure and optimism. Besides, that Christmas Amaryllis is never going to bloom anyway.

Blind yourself with light. Experts will say that you need a special lamp to alleviate cruddy February feelings, but I say just stare at a bare fluorescent bulb until you get multicolored floaters so fascinating you can’t take your eyes off of them, or vice versa! Short-term distraction from existential lethargy is worth long-term retinal damage, I always say.

Eat foods that are hot. I don’t know why, but something about the thermogenic effect of freshly roasted brussels sprouts or freshly-microwaved frozen burrito will cause a concomitant warming of your soul. Salad in February will make you want to die. If you’re the sort of person who regularly drinks smoothies, you are likely too self-satisfied about being flush with nutrients to need these tips anyway.
—Corollary: drink some tea. Tea is practically water and water is good for you, but drinking hot water alone is the kind of thing only people on juice cleanses do. Use tea bags if you have them, you freakin’ ROCKEFELLER, but if you’re an ordinary plebe like me you can just dump whatever stuff you’ve got (like sliced-up ginger root or turmeric powder or chunks of lemon) into a mug and pour boiling water on it.
—Exception: eat as much citrus fruit as you can possibly stomach. Clementines are like chewing on wedges of pure sunshine. Blood oranges are like EATING BLOOD. Grapefruits are fine if you have one of those jagged-edged spoons.

Immerse yourself in the kind of thick non-fiction books with no pictures that are gathering dust on your father’s bookshelves. You know the ones I mean: small print and titles like “America in the Depression,” “The Grimmest Hour of the Storming of Normandy,” and “They Died Screaming in Their Beds: The 1915 Bloodboil Epidemic in San Diego.” They will not make you feel better, per se, but you might gain some perspective.

Don’t drink alcohol. It’s so counterintuitive, I know! But alcohol is technically a depressant, and it’s also expensive. It really is not going to make you feel any better. Here: pretend you’re in the Union Army, and they have to saw your leg off, but the last brandy ration has gone to your comrade in arms Jebediah Wagonwheel to help him endure an experimental eye-gouging procedure after he caught a musketball to the face. In other words, grit your teeth, valiantly, and maybe bite down on a leather strap.

Sleep a lot. Not just at night. Work sporadic sleep-snacks into your daily schedule. Use the Pomodoro technique: for every 25 minutes of sleep, do 5 minutes of work.

Don’t take your Christmas tree down, if applicable. Look, I know it’s already Lent (Christ, Lent AND February? This is a Puritan time indeed), but every sight of those crispy brown needles and wanly-winking lights will jolt you—albeit briefly—out of your melancholy. At least until you realize how embarrassing it’ll be to toss the thing on the curb in March.

Watch the thing that you like. You know the one. It’s okay that you’re not reading a book or composing a symphony or curing cancer with your record-breaking marathon time. Just pile on the blankets and watch the thing.

Skip it. Just skip all of February. Fake your own death and go to Florida or California or, I dunno, Monaco. Failing that, just do the stuff that you have to, like your job, and your deadline-y projects, and all relevant caretakery of yourself and others, but don’t pick this month to launch the ambitious stuff. Just maintain your pace for 29 days, like a shark swimming ever-forward. Then fake your own death, and get to work.