With or Without Eyebrows

 without eyebrows and with

Photos by Bowtie Photography

    First of all let me just say the photos were taken by my everything-daughter Grace's boyfriend Bob O'Daniel. You can find examples of his work on deviantart.com under bowtiephotography. He was in no way responsible for my makeup.

   I wanted to write a book and have it on the shelves in the Edmond Public Library. A fairly simple want, don't you think?

   I attended classes with an excellent writing teacher, William Bernhardt. I wrote and wrote and wrote until I had what I thought was a pretty good book. I hired an editor, Grace Wagner (gfmwagner@gmail.com. She edits for other writers, too. Not just her mother. I'm lucky to have her in-house.) and enlisted Beta readers including authors, a retired police detective, a retired librarian, some analytical readers, and some recreational readers. Then rewrote and rewrote and rewrote. I understand this is necessary even if you get accepted by an agent and one of the Big Five publishing houses.

   I pitched Murder on Ceres and submitted it to agents and editors, all to no avail. I've listened to other authors tell horror stories about submitting manuscripts and never hearing back. About getting and losing agents and getting agents who didn't seem to push their books. The writing community is rife with bad news about the traditional publishing world. Publishing houses downsizing and struggling even with their legacy writers. Ebooks are taking an ever greater share of the market and the old vanity presses are being replaced by legitimate small publishing houses and self-publishing. All of which seems to be throwing the New York publishers into more of a muddle.

I am obviously (look at my photos) no longer in my 20's or 30's or, for that matter, my 50's. I don't have all the time in the world to get discovered amid all this chaos. So I self-published with Amazon's Create Space.

   Murder on Ceres is a beautiful book. It's listed on Amazon, available in both print and Kindle editions. Among many thousands of other books. To catch readers' attention, I must promote it myself. Which brings us to those two pictures. Our purpose the evening that Bob came was to make a photo for business cards.

   My hairdresser had advised me to wear makeup which I don't ordinarily do. Eye-liner, the whole nine yards. I bought makeup. Now keep in mind that during my single days and working-in-the-public days, my eyebrows were still dark enough to show up without using eyebrow pencil. They're almost as pale as my hair now. I stood in the makeup aisle quite a while trying to decide what color eyebrow pencil I should buy. Have you looked at makeup recently? Not only are there seemingly millions of brands, but each brand has twenty-eleven different colors of everything -- foundation, mascara, eye shadow, lipstick, eyebrow pencil. I chose the slate eyebrow pencil thinking slate is gray. Right?

   Now the only other time I'd used an eyebrow pencil was for my mother after she died. I had watched her apply her eyebrows many times and I did a pretty good job for her for that last time.

   I thought about my own eyebrows. They had always been fuller than Mother's, so it made sense to me that I should make mine rather full.

    By the bye, slate is very dark gray.

   Bob was setting up his equipment -- lights, those umbrella things, a matte black backdrop -- while I did my makeup. Pretty soon my husband came to see what was taking me so long. He stepped to the bathroom door. I was facing the mirror. When I turned to face him, he got such a look of startlement (Is there such a word?) that it scared me.

   He quickly recovered and, being of sound mind and sensibly cautious, he allowed as how he wasn't used to seeing me in makeup. Bob, also being of sound mind, didn't even stutter-step. He just told me where to stand, adjusted the lighting, and took the pictures.

   As he left, Bob asked if he could come back the next evening if Grace didn't like any of the pictures he'd taken.

   The next morning, bright and early, Grace called. "What were you thinking? Did you look in the mirror?"

   "I didn't think they looked that bad," said I.

   "No, Mother," she said in that tone. "They look fine for a stand-up comedian. Groucho-Marx-ish."

    Grace may be of sound mind, but when it comes to her mother she's never been sensibly cautious or even vaguely tactful. But she loves me.

   "Bob and I will be there this evening after I get off work. Do NOT put makeup on before I get there," she said. 

    I think she was right.

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Self-Publishing and Platforms for Sales

My Website Home Page

Remember me whining about pitching my book to an agent? I complained about being required to sell my book (Murder on Ceres – wink, wink) and really I had to sell myself, too. So the agent would know there was a future for both of us. And I hated it.

So I decided to self-publish. What was I thinking? How am I going to get my book out there for readers to read? Well, salesmanship of course.

A publisher (not a big New York City publisher, but one who has several years in the business) asked me during my pitch two years ago what platforms I was on. I hadn’t any idea what he was talking about. So I sat in on the panel discussion on platforms at that writers’ conference. He meant Facebook, Twitter, blogging, Pinterest, websites, etc. ad infinitum.

Well I’ve been on Facebook for several years. It was a painful and frightening experience to be on Facebook. But now I like it, except when someone with whom I am not personal friends wants to friend me. Just typing ‘friend’ as an active verb makes me cringe. I have 34 friends and only one is someone I’ve never met. Most of my ‘friends’ are relatives and the one I don’t know is a close relative of a relative.

In person, I am friendly. On the internet, not so much. Maybe, not at all. But I’m trying.

Blogging is pretty easy for me. I used to work for a small-town daily newspaper, so I’m used to people I don’t know reading what I write. There was always a certain anonymity with that. People who didn’t know me personally recognized my name, but not my face.

My editor and graphic designer daughter Grace is helping me become active on these platforms. Trusting my computer skills, she gave me a website that helps you set up your own website, SquareSpace.com. I don’t know if the instructions on that website are not simple enough for me or if my antipathy to the project was so strong that I couldn’t allow myself to understand them. Whatever.

I made an appointment for her to come to my house and ‘help’ me do it. We sat side by side with our laptops – me playing solitaire, her building the website and periodically asking me questions. Not how-to questions, you understand, but what-do-you-want and is-this-what-you-had-in-mind questions.

There were things she learned not to ask me. She showed me umpteen fonts and at each one I sounded like A Christmas Story Ralphie’s little brother. “Oooo. I like this one.”

What was Ralphie’s little brother’s name? I know, I could Google it. Or ask Grace.

She suggested posting updates and book reviews on Google. That didn’t sound so bad.

Then she set me up a Twitter account. I wrote down what I thought she said its address is in my little black book. I tried this morning to get on my Twitter or whatever it is you do with your twitter and couldn’t. I went to my website to access my Twitter and this is what I got.

“Twitter has automated systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk. Unfortunately, it looks like this account, @CWeberWagner, got caught up in one of these spam groups by mistake.
We apologize for this inconvenience. It’s possible your account posted an update that appeared to be spam, so please be careful what you tweet or retweet. You might also want to review our help page for hacked or compromised accounts://support.twitter.com/entries/68916. You will need to change your behavior to continue using Twitter. Repeat violations of the Twitter Rules may result in the permanent suspension of your account.”

But my only tweet was “Check out my new webpage at http://cweberwagner.com , where #scifi and #murdermystery combines! #newauthor”

A bit of research and multiple attempts to do as they directed and I am back on my Twitter. That sounds so much more fun than it feels.

I promise to change my behavior and never, never repeat my violations. Cross my heart.

Then there are the business cards to decide on. And I’ll have to have a new picture for the business cards and to update my profiles. And a new haircut for the picture.

And I haven’t decided matte or glossy for the cover.

I’m feeling pressured.

Maybe I should tweet that.