How to use this Page

You know when you put something off so long that the problem solves itself? And by that I mean, melds with another problem so you just have one big problem? I meant to do a little post about my newly revamped website, and also to post on this poor, dusty blog more than once every six weeks.

In any case, I made a new front page image, based on that earlier painting and folding in illustration with design:


I'm super happy with how he came out, and have been circling the piece since, trying to figure out how to build off of it.

Okay, first problem/thing I procrastinated about solved! The other thing I wanted to talk about went live yesterday.

I have a new story in Twist Collective!

I've taken to describing this assignment as Illustrator Bait. It's a three-part narrative with a lonely peasant girl and magic and hand lettering and knitting. Take a look, but kindly click on the above link to see the pieces in context and read Daryl Brower's lovely story:








What was especially nice about this job was how smoothly I worked, compared to the last story I did for Twist Collective. Straight out of school, I was so nervous about messing up the paintings that I worked them half to death. I also managed to schedule a three-day interview the week before they were due, so I was both panicked and exhausted. On the (very) plus side, my fee for that job and the money I made selling the paintings paid for first, last, and deposit on the apartment I'm still living in today.

Alright, posting completed! In a fit of productive procrastination, I also reinvigorated my Etsy shop (yes, again), so the paintings are for sale there, among posters, notebooks, and cards. As usual, tell your rich friends.

Until next time (October?)!

Before my first novel was published, I used to write short stories. After a few years of sending out my work, I realized I was selling about one story in every ten. Often “selling” merely meant publication in return for free copies of the magazine it appeared in, but I’m not talking about money here, I’m talking about an editor liking my story enough to publish it and bring it to a wider readership (which for short fiction is often as good as it gets). So for every story of mine that made it into the wider world, there were another nine hopefuls that saw only the inside of my computer. Other writers talk of their bottom drawers, but I prefer to think of my published work as the tip of an iceberg, or – because ice seems too cold for creativity – the tip of my “storyberg”. The unpublished stories make up the much larger chunk below the waterline that nobody can see.

Since I have published around 50 short stories, that means 450 unpublished ones floating around below the surface… a fair amount of work! Was it wasted? Out of interest, I recently went back and re-read a few. Some of my earlier efforts clearly deserve to be drowned in the depths for all eternity, but others aren’t so bad. They just didn’t fit the market at the time, or (more likely) never found the right market because I gave up sending them out. But those 450 unpublished stories were clearly necessary in order to write the 50 that did make it into readers' hands. Every single one of them needed to be written, or the tip of my storyberg would not exist.

These days I write books, and the process is similar. “Song Quest” was my twelfth novel, but the first to be published. Since then I’ve had 12 more books published, but have about 100 other projects in various stages of progress in my files, most which will never see the light of day. At certain stages of an author’s career, it seems necessary to grow the storyberg below the waterline rather than above so that the whole thing can continue to float when the next project makes it into the sunlight. Sometimes it seems as if no progress is being made, and other authors' storybergs seem to be growing so much faster than mine - but, of course, I cannot see how much is lurking below their waterlines and I suspect the author who publishes everything they write does so at their peril, since top-heavy storybergs will not stay afloat for very long.