My Ugly Mug

With a teeth-grinding cringe, I present - me. With the publication of my story in Electric Spec, I've taken a bit of time away from writing and started putting together my website. I've been putting it off for a while, largely because of embarrassment. See, I don't talk to people about writing. Only a couple of very close friends know I write, and none of my family, business associates, clients or wider circle of acquaintances do. So I've kept things pretty anonymous up until now. As a kind of baby step to outing myself, I've posted a photo to this blog. I was wearing a suit for a meeting yesterday, so when I got home I held my mobile phone at arm's length and did that (eyes to the top right).

And this brings me to a wider issue of letting it be known you're an aspiring writer. I find it really, really embarrassing. I've read in a couple of agent and editor blogs that having a decent website is becoming pretty much a requirement for those of us trying to get over the transom into publishing. I have a leg up, there, in that it's what I do for a living, so no problem. My website, still in development, looks slick and professional and will take no time to finish (thanks to our super-duper templating and content management systems). But putting a website out there with my ugly mug on it, proclaiming myself to be a writer (amongst other things) just seems so ... vain.

Really, the very idea of it is making my toes curl.