Let’s be honest, I’m not particularly good at this whole ‘professional author’ gig. The truth is, I’m not entirely sure I am one anyway, and I certainly won’t feel like I’m cresting that little hill until I hold my book in my hands. As I write this, my debut novel should have been out for four days (by the original plan) but due to some jiggery-pokery at my wonderful publishers, we have another few months to wait. So here I am, filling time until the release, wondering what it is ‘professional authors’ even do.

Apparently, author photographs are a thing… so I had a crack at that. All I can say is thank god for my mate, Pam, who is a(n actual professional) photographer because holy hell, I was not a professional photographee (is that even a word?)

This all came about because I started interacting in little ‘author worlds’ with people who actually are authors and they all had spanky shiny photographs on their various profiles. I, on the other hand, have a profile pic in which I’m a bit hammered and halfway down a Long Island Iced Tea… and a website ‘logo’ that looks like two deformed pigeons playing hide and seek (and with missing legs!) The publishers website looks like they’ve invited the works experience kid to play along with them… so we did something about it.

Pam is a legend. There’s a whole history there that I won’t go into but suffice to say, a few Sundays ago Pam and her lovely family rocked up at our place with all the gear and we had a blast. I’d cheekily asked Pam if she had a rock star kind of ‘rider’ – you know, requests for food and beer etc – she replied with ‘pulled lamb sliders, craft beer and purple MnMs’.

The only thing I couldn’t find was purple MnMs!

We had a ball! We drank craft beer, we ate sliders, and Pam worked her magic while I continued to drink and take the piss… because I am the unprofessional professional.

Last week, I got a batch of photographs through from Pam and despite the subject matter being me, they’re really fun. This is batch one of two. Pretty soon I’m going to have to pick which ones I’m going to use for where. Any suggestions?

(You can check out Pam’s amazing work at https://www.pjbphotography.com.au/)