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In Which I Too Am Damned WRITING as a career choice is a series of steps. When you're a young, inexperienced writer you dream merely of seeing your name in print. Your name in black-on-white letters on a printed page that you did not mock up yourself after an evening spent drinking siphoned liquor from your parents' cabinet seems like all that is needed to make your life complete. Then, one day, you achieve this goal: Somewhere, some fool takes something you wrote and prints it, voluntarily, in a place where people might actually read it. And for a split second, it's really cool and you're ecstatic. And almost immediately, you start dreaming of getting paid for your writing. Eventually, if you're any good and have some concept of craft and persistence—mainly persistence—this happens too. Maybe it isn't $2000 from Playboy or a fat advance from some behemoth publishing house, but you get some monetary payment for something you wrote, proving that your writing is at least good enough to earn you some pin money. And for a split second, it's really cool and you're ecstatic. And almost immediately, you start dreaming of getting paid real money for your writing. And on and on it goes—every achievement just leaves you wanting something more. You publish a short story, you want to publish a book. You publish a book with a small press, you want to publish with a big house and have a marketing budget. You sell ten thousand books you want to sell a million. It's never over. And, of course, because writers are in general arrogant and horrible people, you hate people above you on the ladder with the white heat of a million suns. Or at least I do. When I hadn't published anything, I thought people who had should shut up and be happy. When I'd published a few stories but hadn't gotten paid for them, I thought people who had gotten paid should shut up and be happy. When I'd sold a book to a small house that did squat to try and sell it, I thought people who had marketing budgets should shut up and be happy. See how it goes? We're wankers, we writers, every one of us.> Now that I've sold a book to a big publisher, of course, the Cosmos is having its revenge on me, because I have to have author photos taken. About two years ago, I wrote an essay here making fun of the deluded people of the world who, despite having never been paid for a line of writing, had ridiculously serious author photos on display on the Internets. So it's only just, I guess, that I now expose myself to humiliation by having my own photos taken. This is not really my choice; my publisher needs usable professional photos for the various marketing exploits they will employ in order to sell my book The Electric Church. Despite the fact that I am possibly the least photogenic person in the world (not due to any sort of congenital ugliness, I don't think, but rather to a Krusty The Clown-ish inability to not make a subtly ridiculous face whenever a camera is pointed at me), I must now engage a photographer and have pictures taken, which may be plastered all over the world in an attempt—however misguided—to convince otherwise reasonable people to buy a book written by me. Of course, I can't do anything like a normal person, so instead of simply having your usual portrait taken—a nice black-and-white photo of me in front of a bookcase, maybe—I have to make it difficult, because I don't want to be recognizable in my author photo. It probably sounds silly, but on the off chance that I am a big hit and sell tons of books, I don't want people to see me on the street and recognize me from my jacket photo. Forget for a moment the fact that my chances of being so successful are delightfully slim, while your chances of being able to taunt me with drunken barbs about my latest literary failures are pretty good. Forget that and imagine for a second that my book becomes famous. I figure that as silly as it is, I should start preparing for that possibility now. I don't want to be famous. I want to be rich, and I want my books to be famous, but me? No, I want to remain hidden behind the curtain, pulling the levers and spinning the dials, able to frequent lingerie stores and AA meetings in peace. And if my hideous visage is staring at you from every book cover, store poster, and magazine article, that won't be possible. So I have to take steps now. Of course, everyone thinks I am nuts. My agent, the photographer I contacted, my wife—they all think I'm both deluded for imagining that a time may come when people will stalk me like Brad Pitt and for not wanting to be recognized by my adoring public. But I am adamant that my photo leave a lot to the imagination. So I've been pondering possibilities, and here's what I've come up with so far: 1. A Stand-In. Why not hire someone to be me in photos? There are plenty of aspiring actors and models out there who'd be happy to pose for a few photos for some money. Then I could be, say, this guy:
2. A Disguise. Maybe a chicken suit, or a Zorro mask. Imagine walking into a bookstore and seeing this on a book cover:
Instant sale! 3. Artfully Obfuscated. My final thought is to bite the bullet and appear in my own photo, but to have it taken in such a way as to make it impossible to see who, or possibly what, I am. This is a sticky wicket to navigate, of course, as 99% of all attempts will result in me looking ridiculous, and a man in my position can't afford to be made to look ridiculous. The only thing to do is to hire a professional photographer and rely on their sense of style. The only other thing to do is to get extremely drunk the day you're going to have the pictures taken and do your best Dean Martin impersonation, and keep doing it no matter what. The end result should indicate that a human being is responsible for the book, but give no clues whatsoever of what that human being looks like. Believe me, it's best for all of us that way. I know this will end in horror and tears. My author photos will turn out to be more or less normal, except they will have a haunting, impossible flaw that slowly drives all who view it insane, thus stopping sales of my novel in the low triple digits before the crazed masses burn the bookstores down. This is pretty much how all my photos have turned out, although to be honest the only person being driven insane by them is me. I mean, look at this:
You can probably feel the moorings of your sanity slipping free right now! Try to stay coherent long enough to buy The Electric Church when it publishes, or else I'll have to come to your house and burn it down.
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Feb 11, 2006
