Winners, and Meljean has crazy-eyes.

First, business: Thanks to the power of random.org, the winner of Laura Kinsale’s SHADOWHEART is:

Random Integer Generator

Here are your random numbers:

7

#7 — RachieG!

Congratulations!

***

So.

Remember when I said a while back that “Thicker Than Blood” is a RITA finalist? Well, apparently, you have to turn in a picture to RWA. And I have an author picture, but when I got it, it was a quick, OMG I need a pic! situation, so I ran down to my parents’ house and had my sister take about 700,000 pics of me at the park.

Well, that picture doesn’t work, because although it’s fine for the web, it’s not high-resolution or anything. So, I said to my sister: Echo, I need you to take another pic, but this one has to be printable. And so we decided I’d do it when I got a chance (at the time, I was chained to my laptop, and Echo lives an hour away, so there was no pic.)

But yesterday, I had to go to my parents’ house anyway, so I took my ‘business’ jacket (the one that’s supposed to make me look all professional and shit.)

The problem is, of course, that my face doesn’t cooperate with the ‘professional and shit.’ Seriously, it is SO hard not to laugh. In practically every single picture, I’m either trying not to laugh (which, at 300 pixels/inch, manages to show every single wrinkle I’ve developed in the past couple of years (but I’ve shrunkened the pic here so that they don’t show so much, hahah) *sob*)

Or, the sun is shining in my eyes in the perfect way to cast a shadow over half of them and make it look like I’m going to kill her. I won’t post those, because I don’t want to scare anyone.

Then I had help (my favorite pics out of all that we took). First, she sneaks up behind me (I was sitting on a log that jammed a broken-off branch half up my ass):

Then attacks:

And I’m smiling, but in reality she’s choking me half to death. But, aw, she’s so cute.

Anyway, this is the best out of all of them, and I have crazy-eyes (and it was getting windy and starting to rain, and my hair* was going all over the place):

Because I have a really hard time keeping my eyes open when I’m taking pictures (they narrow down into tiny little things) simply because of the trying-not-to-laugh problem (and my cheeks bunch way up), so I make an effort to OPEN my eyes WIDE and it gives me the spacey look.

So, I dunno. I might head out to a real place where they do magic stuff with eyeballs and lights.

*Also — next time I’m not going to cut my own hair with my daughter’s safety scissors about three weeks before I get my picture taken. So maybe, hair stylist first, then professional pictures. Sigh. I hate that. Nothing was worse than picture day when I was a kid.