“Get a professional headshot taken. You would be surprised how many professional writers have terrible headshots. If you can afford to, hire a professional and get a great shot. This will make you appear more serious and professional as a writer.”
Promoting Your Work, Dublin Writer’s Centre.
Kevin writes:
The post above, on the website of one of the country’s primary literary resource organisations, provoked me to invent a rising new Irish novelist. His name is Zenith Kane. I took their advice re: getting a headshot done that would make me look like a serious writer (see above).
Zenith
Zenith Kane is the type of guy
who, home from a challenging afternoon
in the rat eat rat milieu that is the trade
in self-rotating slurry tanks,
lowers himself into his marble bathtub
with his pet electric eel;
makes up plans
to go, first, into politics
then the global arms trade as a lobbyist,
to familiarise himself with the menus
of the better hotels in Brussels,
Beirut, the District of Columbia;
then retire to a purpose built shed
the far end of the garden to drink
Ginseng tea through a handmade straw
and draft the twenty seventh best novel
in the history of front cover blurbs written
by critics with specialist haircuts and names
translated into Gaelic;
bathe in the sunlight of the quality press
declaring it brilliant
before it’s even written.
But last things first: those business cards,
and the professionally done head shot
all the websites say a novelist of his standing
must these days have.
For now, though, the struggle to rise
pinkly out of the bathtub while feeding
an eel buzzing its discontent
frogs and crabs by the bag load,
so tomorrow he can again be Zenith
and talk a man from Anbally or Gortlusky
into a tank with a rotating paddle
guaranteed to maintain the quality of his slurry.
Kevin, I love your poetry, thank you.
Zenith Kane is great, I’ve read all his book§…