The Real Deal, Not the Fake One, Part II. Aka Fuck You, Writer-Advice-Givers.

NOW I remember why the title of the previous post. Crap. Brain mush is more advanced than I thought. Yes. Photo. Okay.

So I got new headshots, as they're called, taken for the new book. (And why not? The last ones are seven years old and more than a bit misleading because, well, I'm seven years older . . .  Makes sense to me.)

The People Who Dole Out Advice To Writers (and their numbers are legion and I have no use for their ilk) ALWAYS tell writers: Get a professional headshot taken. And wear makeup. Or at least the women are supposed to wear makeup. Not the men. The women. (*1)

To which I say: Meh. I don't own any makeup. I wore it for about two weeks in eighth grade (at the suggestion of my mother, who also more or less ordered me to a) curl my hair so it would straighten; and b) wear a girdle. (This was the 1960s. I weighed about 100 pounds and was 5'9" at the time. I mean seriously? One of my few acts of teenage rebellion ensued.)

Anyway: here's the photo. This, friends, is what real women look like when they're not photoshopped, airbrushed, or whatever. They look ---- real. And this is what OLD women look like (I'll be sixty in a few months.)

So to the rest of the world with its "wear makeup" advice, I say: Fuck you.

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*1: Random point worth making: EVERYONE on TV is wearing makeup: men, women, kids. Lots of it. It's one reason I hate doing TV. I don't like wearing makeup and don't know how to put it on and usually there's not a pro on hand to do it. And nowadays if one doesn't wear makeup on TV, one looks roughly forty years older than one is and no, I'm kidding. It's the high definition cameras that do it. An HD camera can make a 20 year old look like she's at least fifty. And that's really distracting.