... which wasn't anything like book work but it did give me the chance to take in a great concert and remind myself that I'll never be in a cool band or play a cool show and that I'd better get my tiny butt in gear and make some awesome books because that's really the only thing I do well enough call it cool. Otherwise, I'm just a skinny introvert with an unnecessarily large vocabulary and unhealthy quantity of India ink. (Be sure to see The Luyas if you get the chance. We've seen billions of opening acts, all of which were yawn worthy, but I'd pay good money to see The Luyas again.)
The past week was spent entertaining and shuttling friends around the city. So, I’m having a hard time finding any sort of progress to write about. I sort of knew that was going to happen. Today is the first day of me getting back to work. Woohoo.
One of the few book related events of the past week occurred when I received the copy edited version of the punk book. I knew it was coming, but I must say I was unprepared for it. See, with my picture books, being made of somewhere between 250 to 1,200 words, there wasn’t much to copy edit. Copy editing, for those who don’t know, is when someone with mad grammar skilz comes along to clean up the text that barely tumbled from my primate evolved typing paws. Anyway, it was pretty easy to go word by word in an picture book and make sure that everything was either correct or exactly what I wanted as I tend to like a bit of odd grammar here and there. In a few hours, we’d perfect the text and move on. Not so with the punk book. It turns out that a novel, especially one written from the perspective of a high school kid with all the made up words that such a character might enjoy, makes for a lot of copy editing. Like a lot a lot. (See, it’s sentences like that last one that get me in trouble. Did I mean to write “a lot” just once and accidentally type it twice or did I delete some words in between which caused “a lot” and “a lot” to end up right next to each other or did I really mean to write “a lot a lot” which is, of course, exactly what I meant to do… The punk book is literally created by such terrible language, otherwise known as how I speak in the real world.) Consequentially, there’s this huge file on my desktop just waiting for me to hack into it, word by word. I get to agree or respectfully disagree with my copy editor and then ship it off and see what hybrid version of the text finally hits the press. It’s not really hard work, but it’s a little daunting. For a few minutes, I contemplated only making wordless picture books from now on. But really, what’s the fun of doing the same safe and boring stuff all the time? There’s something exciting about this whole new world of novel madness. I mean, I am a frustrated writer hiding in the guise of a slightly confident illustrator.
On the professional front, I’m now 99% sure that I’ll be manning a table with Gareth Hinds at the 2012 MoCCA Fest. If you recall, I wrote a post about attending the last MoCCA Fest and how I felt like I’d finally found people who were working the same esoteric vein of illustrated media that I am. I might have even referred to them as my “peeps”… though “potential peeps” was probably more accurate. Now I have new things to think about, mainly, making stuff to sell at said table. It’s sort of like an etsy fair for indie comic, cartoon and illustrator people and book lovers alike. Having never done anything like this, all of my selling experience comes in the form of books and framed art in galleries, I’m a little out of my depth. So, if anyone can think of cool little things that I could make, I’d love to hear your ideas. At present, my brain storm list contains things like the following: posters, random drawings, bookmarks, stickers, etc. Right now, I’m open to anything. And I’m especially open to anything uber quirky, since uber quirky is what attracts the attention of blasé, indie people. Sure, I don’t care about quirky, but if that gets them to look at my real work, then that’s what I’ll do. Man! Look at me trying to sell out. I’m so terrible at it that it’s laughable. I am no salesman.
And there you have it. Now I’m off to draw so that I have something to talk about next week.
0 comments:
Post a Comment