I was born...

I was born, now that is a leading opening  Could be followed by: in a log cabin; when Halley's Comet streaked across the sky; or none of the preceding.  Recently, I received some advice from Amazon on how to improve my writer's profile.  Number one was to redo my biography in the first person to be more warm and friendly, but heck, I like pretending I have a staff to do this stuff.  The truth is in the e-publishing world, the author writes everything from her bio to her backcover blurbs, so you may blame me for any and all errors.

Suggestion number two: have a professional portrait done.  Check.  I did this early on paying a lot for three poses which I have used liberally, so a good investment.  However, they do stress not to put pets or anything else distracting the photo.  Personally, I think a dog or cat would add to the interest rather than just a head pose of me.  I am not that gorgeous, but do have a good smile.

Number three: Give only a few details about your life in the first paragraph, i.e. I live in Louisiana, then cram a second paragraph full of awards you have won for your writing.  Now, when I was a librarian, I received some pretty prestigous awards, the best being the Culver Award for Outstanding Librarianship, but that gives me no creds as a writer. Personally, I've found the more awards won, the drearier the book.  Unhappy ending assured.  I might never have a writing award to list, but my books won't leave you depressed and saying, "Why did I ever read this?"  I could give specific examples, but don't believe in dissing other writers.  Again, I am cautioned not to talk about pets, children, or my last road trip, this being unprofessional.  Frankly, I'd rather hear about an author's cat than some obscure award, but that's just me.

Four: Establish a feed to your blog.  I managed to do this for www.romancingthejock.com almost by accident, but never did tie this one on to my profile.  No matter.  I am not the most prolific blogger.  Once a month for both blogs is all you will ever get out of me.  I so much prefer to be working on my latest novel.  As I like to say, I write two of those a year whether any publisher wants them or not.

One thing I do like about blogging is getting comments, which rarely happens, and looking at my statistics so nicely provided by Blogger.  Today, I learned my biggest following seems to be in Russia.  Go figure.  I did study Russian in high school and could greet you with the first dialog we memorized, that is to say "How are you?"  "Very good, and you?"  However, I have no idea how to type that in Cyrillic.  Other than that, I have retained only a few stray words, most of them regarding food.  See, this tidbit did not make it into my biography at all.  So, Hi to my friends in Russia and good-bye for the month of March.