Mark Charan Newton

A packed but fun weekend. On Saturday, I met up with James Long, who runs a tidy little review blog at Speculative Horizons. We managed to chat non-stop about books and life for a solid six hours. A thoroughly nice chap, who I hope to catch up with again at Alt Fiction later this month.

Sunday brought a strange phenomenon to light: the author photograph.

Now, some might say I’m image conscious. Maybe my ex-girlfriends will do so with anger zest. But I was terribly (terrified?) self-conscious about getting some publicity shots done. Peter Lavery at Macmillan suggested I get some decent photography done. Apparently shite-askew-bizarrely-lit-social-networking-pictures just won’t do.

I had a look around at a few local photographers. Most were competent enough, but just didn’t have an eye to bring out any character, didn’t do Art. And most author photographs are famously crap or out of date. I’m not going to be one of these writers of a certain age who thinks leather jackets lend them cool. ‘Hey, boy, look how hip I am! Do they still say hip?’ They do not. I could pull the posing in a T-shirt pose, but that ain’t my thing either. It all reeks of trying a bit too hard, don’t you think? Lacks any soul.

Anyway, I stumbled across a cracking local photographer called Agnieszka Taflinska. She was fantastic. A spritely Polish girl, renting some rooms in a big old Victorian house. She had a great personality that managed to draw me out of standing like a corpse in front of the camera. She got me jumping around and waving my arms and all sorts of stuff to liven me up. She had some cool downtempo beats in the background like some bohemian dream. Then took a hundred or so snaps, downloaded them to her Mac, and started tinkering whilst I drank tea. There is a point (pretty quickly in my case) where you can’t stand to look at images of yourself any longer.

One of the snaps is up on my MySpace page, and my website shall be updated shortly. These things take time. Here’s the main one:

But quite an odd experience. Generally speaking, I prefer to be writing then doing stuff like this for publicity, but Agnieszka made the experience great fun. Writing is only half the job these days. Authors have to be out there, to help promote their book, do interviews, signings and whatnot. I have no opinion on that; it’s just the way things are in 2008. Get’s ‘em socialising.

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