Ellen Stimson

Look Natalie Stultz is a great photographer. She took a whole bunch of beautiful pictures that bore little resemblance to the hot anxious unstable girl who was posing in front of her. It was 90 degrees. This happens a couple of times a year in Vermont and picture day was the day apparently. I was nervous anyway having accidentally forgotten to lose the extra 25 pounds I meant to lose by picture day. And sweaty. This was not the glistening perspiration that makes a woman look all ripe and excited. This was more of the sweat pouring down my face and in between my boobs variety

Can I just say ohmygod. But then the pictures came and somehow Natalie got some that didn’t look like I’d just spent a day with a work crew n the side of the highway. And now the pic is off and running at the publisher where it will be forevermore the   AUTHOR photo.

I am a storyteller but this whole author business makes me squirmy. People are asking me how to get their books published. How do I tell them (and have them believe me) that I really have no idea. I am sort of making it up as I go along. A recent story in the Onion by Joyce Carol Oates said to sleep with everyone you know in publishing. That seems about as good a method as any I know. I ran the– call beg plead– gamut and got lucky. Very lucky. Now Mud Season is coming in October and I have a picture to prove it.

I always hated picture day in school. If every school would just hire Natalie I am thinking  the world would be a happier saner place