Sunday, November 14, 2010

No Direction at All

In the interest of seeming more professional, I've been updating my profile in all the Webby places: FB, Goodreads, Linked In, etc., etc., just in case some poor fool wandering the Web-o-sphere might be looking for a relatively un-published writer upon whom they can bestow, well, what I wonder? A contract, I guess, for the book I haven't yet written.

I've been pretty good with the submission bios, keeping them short and sweet, sticking to the basic facts with only a smattering of truthiness. I don't believe in tarting up my accomps any more than I have to. Not fond of being coy or cutsey-wootsy either, so I avoid statements like: "when not herding cats the size of watermelons on the far reaches of the Canadian Prairies, LK writes with gremlin-sharpened egret feathers dipped in ink of a giant squid the better to capture the pure essence of...well, whatever." or " LK waits for the dog of inspiration to drop the well-chewed bone of contention into her lap; then gets busy."  Even if it is true. Or, true-ish.

But my professional cv is rather slim, having been busy with other things. Too many other things.

So, to pad things up a bit,  I'm tempted to use this:

Lakin Khan has been, in no particular order,  a gymnast (though you wouldn't know that now), an atheist (until I had children), a violinist, a tool-and-die machine shop programmer back when we used punch-tape to code the instructions (believe it!), a waitress, a short-order cook, a restaurant owner, a swimmer, a tabla student of Allah Rakha and Zakir Hussein at the Ali Akbar College of Music, a freelance photographer with a wandering eye, a wedding photographer's assistant who never understood the old cake-in-the-face business, a photo-journalist, a wannabe-acolyte in the church of my own creation, an English major, a flute player, and for one year, a double-major in math and French; a half-assed wife, a worrier par excellance, a born-again agnostic and a Neo-pagan Evangelical Unitarian, one of those truly bad girlfriends, a good-enough mother, a Fictioneer and A Friend to Poets; a professor-wrangler, cat-handler, badger-worshipper; and every other Friday in June, a banjo-strumming nitpicker with misplaced mordant wit and a bad case of insomnia.

Just the usual writer resume, all over the place with no direction at all*.

 * with thanks to Bobby Zimmerman.

3 comments:

  1. OK, I wanna know about the badger worshipping.

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  2. I think this refers to the badger in "The Wind in the Willows", a local deity figure who represents wisdom.

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  3. yeah, yeah...that's the ticket!

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Noise makers!