Sunday, 8 January 2012

 

VANITY, VANITY!!

 

A New Year, a new book coming out - THE SECRET SHE KEPT  - isn't it time I got a new author photograph?  I've had the current one since my first book with Headline - DANCE WITH WINGS, three years ago.  Used it on my Facebook page, my web sites, even as my avatar on Twitter.  Because I actually rather like it, even though it is a bit too glam with arguably a bit too much cleavage ...

It was taken at a posh dinner I attended.  Originally there were four of us in the photo - Terry, my husband, myself, and two friends.  On our way in the photographer posed us under a big umbrella and the result was gratifyingly flattering.  So when I was asked for a pic for the jacket of the hardback edition of DANCE WITH WINGS and I was a bit short of time I asked him if he could 'lift' me out.  Bless him, he did.  I watched, atonished, as the other three disappeared - he even wiped out my husband's hand, which had been on my shoulder. 

The pic you see here is the result.  But I do really feel it's time to update it.  After all, it is several years old ...

And of course, there's the rub!  I'm several years older too!  With, no doubt, a few more wrinkles and lines, the sort that multiply with spending so many hours on the computer and a whole lot more trying to work out plot details for my books!  It's as hard to give up a flattering photo as it is to give up chocolate - or my glass of wine! 

In November I had a 'big birthday' and my lovely daughter made a triptych of photographs of me from the age of eighteen months to the present day.  Oh, what memories those pics evoked for me!  From little girl with 'Dobbin', my wooden horse on wheels, to teenager, to mother, to grandmother.  there are pics of me on holiday, in the cockpit of the plane when I was learning to fly, on stage in various roles from Lucy in Ladies in Retirement to principal boy in panto, pics of book launch parties, even one of me in a bikini doing a Yoga Bow beside some swimming pool.  My life in photographs.  Happy days evoking bitter-sweet nostalgia.

I expect it's the same for most of us.  Lurking in old paper wallets, posted in albums, loaded into files on computers these days, are the pics that chart the whole of our lives.

For me, it has to be time to move on again.  Pile on the lippy, get the photographer to use soft lighting if not a soft-focus lens, and brave reality.  A new pic will be on the way, I promise.

When I can work up the courage to face reality ....