The Punk Ethic

Smarch Madness.

2012-03-13T22:52:00.002-04:00

Which is far cooler than March Madness because who can really get excited about a sport where every single game ends the same way? What with a thousand fouls in the last 5 seconds and a desperation shot at the buzzer to either win or lose… why not just save everyone a lot of time and have one guy walk to the center of the court and take a single shot; if he hits it, his team wins, if he misses, his team loses. There’s no reason to drag the whole tournament process out for an entire month. They could be done in less than an hour. And to placate my nephew and apologize for all this bashing, the college basketball tournament still makes a billion times more sense than the college football bowl game “system” which was apparently configured by a drunk chimp… Nah, even a drunk chimp would be smarter than that.

But whatever, my Smarch Madness is all about hyper-productivity. With the soon to be released punk book on the way, the MoCCA Fest on the horizon and my recent trip to Frostburg, I’m all kinds of excited to get things done. It’s the first time since the holidays, which always derail my focus, that I’m completely cruising along at my best. Of course, giving away all my watercolor paints and eliminating a bunch of other distractions helped me get back on track, but really, it’s all about changing the way I think about what I’m doing.

And what am I doing? The truth is, I have no idea. But I do know that it’s all about trashing the notion of being a artist who makes a living as an artist and more to do with being a artist who works like a crazy person because there’s really no point in thinking about anything beyond that sheet of paper on the desk, be it covered in cryptic images or words. Wow, that sentence was rambling and odd. I guess that I’m trying to say that life is always going to be a tricky pain in the butt, however, that shouldn’t affect the stuff that I make. There’s been far too much of that negative thinking, off and on, over the last three years because I’ve been trying to be some sort of cookie cutter definition of a successful, professional illustrator. I know if I break it down, I am successful (I have four books out in the world) and professional (I do, occasionally, get paid to write and draw) and an illustrator (again with the drawing); but trying to be someone who works well within the bounds of what may or may not sell is a waste of my time. I make cool stuff, I enjoy it and the people who stumble across what I do seem to enjoy it as well. You guys are remarkably loyal. So, that’s all that really matters.

Somehow, that made sense when I typed it…

But what it means is that I’m completely jazzed about the stuff on my desk, simply because it will go somewhere. Sure, most of it will go in the trash because it sucks, but the stuff that survives will find its way to a book or online or on somebody’s wall. And odds are that wall will be yours because if you’re reading my blog, you’re one of the five people I already know and since we’re wonderful friends, drawings occasionally just arrive in the mail…

With all of this rambling crazy in mind, here’s what’s going on:

The Punk Ethic should be out May 1. So, get your online carts ready to load up with e-copies of my latest foray into the world of young adult literature. Or look for those soon to be musty paper versions.

I’m cranking out a small pile of 5x7 inch drawings to sell at MoCCA Fest and toying with the notion of making drawings available to people via the infernet. It sounds just so cheap and tawdry that my inner DIY chromosomes are a tingle. That’s going to require some research and I don’t have much time for that sort of thing until the summer.

My goal for 2012 is to make two books. Two books would be one more book than I usually make in a year, which doesn’t sound like much but is actually quite a lot of work. The trick is to use my time and skilz to their utmost, which means one book will be an illustrated masterpiece (a picture book or illustrated YA thing) and the other book will be a novel… er a novella. It’s funny that I have no problem being verbose in my blog voice, but as soon as I write stories, I prefer to be more concise. Anyway, that’s the plan. And since it’s March, it’s time for me to make some decisions as to which projects get the green light and which get to simmer on the backburner. With half a month to go, I have three projects that would require illustrations and four stories that have enough meat to them to become novels. It’s decision making time. Part of me wants to write the name of each project on a tennis ball and drop them down the stairs and whichever ball goes the farthest gets to be the project to work on, but I know that’s too arbitrary for me. Nope, I’ll sit down and look at each one and choose the two that are ready to go. It really shouldn’t be too hard. The hard part is to tuck the other stories away and not dabble with them, what with me being the world’s worst multi-tasker. Perhaps, like all those precious painting supplies I foolishly purchased, I’ll have to lock all my simmering projects in a file cabinet and give the key to Mandy to hide.

… ugh, I’ve rambled enough, now it’s time to work.

Go Bobcats!

2012-03-09T15:10:00.005-05:00

And I’m back in the JC after a whirlwind trip to the wilds of western Maryland, which it seems was a success.

Basically, I gave two lectures to illustration students and “others” in a lovely biology room in Compton Science building on the rather lovely campus of Frostburg State University.

It turns out that I have no problem talking nonstop for 100 minutes. In fact, I only talked about two of my four books and barely scratched the surface of all the faux mental issues that keep me on track as an author and illustrator. But whatever, I spoke about the process of building the plague book from start to finish and then rambled on about how it took seven years to bring the punk book into existence and walked my audience through a massive amount of projected images and a hundred or so drawings taped to the walls. My goal was to present them with an organized lecture about how creative things get done while overwhelming them with images. I think I pulled it off.

Then, I did a little ten minute drawing demo which was the hardest part because my tools are so primitive and what I do is so simple that there isn’t much to show. But I did what I could and answered as many questions as they wanted to throw at me.

All and all, it was fun. By far my best talk yet. Of course, I should be improving. My Frostburg talks gave me the chance to try something new in my approach to being informative without being boring. The plan was to not think too much about what I wanted to say in advance. In previous outings, I’ve planned and organized my thoughts to such a degree that, sure the information was presented in the clearest terms possible, but I was also really, inhumanly boring. I usually did better when I spoke to kids because when things seemed to drag I could always draw a dinosaur and they were right there with me again. Consequently, I reigned in my need to be a control freak and let my inner verboseness take over. Sure, I made a handful of note cards but I didn’t use them. I just built a simple structure that fit the time I was given and rambled about the most important stuff that came to mind, all the time trying not to swear like a sailor as I always fear I will when asked to speak to strangers. I didn’t swear once and I made most if not all my points in very clear language. Win win for me.

So, thanks to the Odone family for asking me to come to Frostburg and putting up with me for a few days. It was an awesome trip and great experience. I send my best creative vibes to all those students slogging away on their projects.

Anyway, time for me to slog away too.

Fresh into Compton...

2012-02-28T13:01:00.005-05:00

It’s pretty much Spring, what with all the sunlight until such ungodly hours like 5 or 6 in the evening. I’ve been thinking too much and talking too much. In fact, I feel like I’ve been talking myself into circles. So, for March, I’m going to give you image driven blog posts with just a hint of text. Maybe after a few weeks, I’ll feel like I have something constructive to say.

Anyway, the big news is that I’m prepping for my two lectures at Frostburg University, which means a whole lot of scanning and brain storming. I’m supposed to be “inspiring”… Hm. I’m thinking of buying either an eye patch or a monocle. Or maybe getting both to really confuse them. Here’s the flyer that Jamie put together to make it look like I’m cool. It gives me yet another chance to give props to Helen Robinson, designer extraordinaire, the talent who gives my books their spritely life. I have no idea how she does it. I send her drawings or scans and a file with the story and the next thing I know, there’s a book that rocks. Her choices are always spot on, from choosing the font for the plague book that everyone loves and asks about because they assume it’s my handwriting (it obviously isn't because my handwriting is so idiosyncratic as to be illegible... but it looks neat) to making me whip up some red watercolor blobs for the punk book just to give it just that much more oomph. Helen is brilliant.

So… my lecture is going to be about how I do what I do. I intend to focus on the punk book, because it’s the most recent thing I’ve done, and the plague book, because it’s the coolest thing I’ve done.

That said, here are some random scans from way down Memory Lane. The first image is a sketch from The Letter Home. In fact, it's one of my two favorite sketches from that book. Most of the drawings I make end up in a box, half forgotten, because I move on to the next thing. But there's always a handful that I can't help but wonder how I made something so cool... This is one of those. The second image is what I do when I'm bored and don't feel like writing, reading, playing the guitar... I make random pencil drawings just for the hell of it.

Somehow Getting Your Butt Kicked Leads to Victory… of a sort…

2012-02-21T14:14:00.004-05:00

With our taxes done, the laundry done and the living room clean, I’m all about starting my week without a lot of mundane chores clouding my mind. I do worry about such things, mostly because I’m always here in the bedroom studio. Unlike most urban dwellers who basically use their apartment as a place to crash when not working or socializing, I pretty much kill most of my time in that place I call home. Which means, I have this nagging need to make it “home-y” for myself and others. Or at worst, not crappy. But that’s done, which means time to work.

So, getting defeated but still winning… yeah, my mystery project takes yet another turn in its development. You’d think, if you follow this blog with any regularity, that I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to this project. To be honest, there are times when I am just as clueless as you are. In fact, I expect that to happen. That’s the difference between Art and Craft, well, in very simplistic terms. A craftsperson, whether they are a talented genius or a useless hack, goes into a project knowing what the finished product is to be. That’s part of what makes craft so cool. You want a chair, you get the materials, you put in the sweat, you end up with a chair. Sure, there’s a lot of different ways to make a chair and many styles of chairs but in the end, you still have to sit on it. An artist, whether they are a talented genius or a useless hack (as most of them are), goes into a project with a notion of what the end product should be… but there’s always room for everything to change.

This past weekend, I was hammering away at my latest design, the third or fourth, I’ve lost count, for my mystery book. It’s a beautiful design, full of Baroque filigree and nonsense surrounding a main image, text block and smaller, tangential image. Truly a pretty way to present an picture. And that’s the thought that killed the layout. I’m not interested in losing two or three years to draw a pile of grandiose images for a book that doesn’t need grandiose images. You see, I want to use my time to make a book that works as a whole unit, something that is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s what I do. I take simple designs, simple words, simple illustrations and combine them with the most complex story I can conjure and, if I try hard enough, make it all work. That’s what gets me excited. It’s part of the secret to my success. I’m not the guy who sits around making up overly complex images and indecipherable prose for books that don’t resonate with the reader. I certainly hope that I never turn into that guy.

I realized that my layout was attractive but dysfunctional. Odd as it may sound, it took drawing something ornate and over the top in order to reach a point when I could start to pare things to their simplest terms. It’s always annoying to put a lot of effort into something just to turn around and toss it in the trash for a far more simple idea. But, annoying as that may be, that’s the creative process. One time, everything works from the get go and it’s a smooth ride. The next time, it’s an uphill slog where everything goes wrong until you either quit or finish it. The mystery project is the latter. But it’s one step closer to being done.

This is a Holiday? Yeah Right.

2012-02-14T15:47:00.001-05:00

Anyway… S’up?

Me? I’m just doing my thing. Trying to kick ass this 2012.

With MoCCA Fest stuff on the back burner, I’m focusing on the mystery book project. As I said, February is the month to really get working on it and, true to my word, I’m doing just that. Thus far, I’ve gone from settling on a design, to creating four basic layout templates to be used for the entirety of the 138 page story, to starting the first ten “finished” illustrations. Not a bad start. Still, it doesn’t feel like much because it’s all conceptual work, which means a lot of drawing of squares and grids and ellipses. It’s all necessary stuff considering how I work and it’s all awful zenful, which is kind of nice; but it never feels like I’m getting things done because I’m not drawing my characters or telling the story. It’s not even like building the sets for a theater production, this is more like building the theater itself. But, once that work is done, and if I do it as well as possible, everything else moves without a hitch. Cliché as it sounds, it’s like a iceberg floating in the sea, there’s so much more going on than is evident with that teeny bit poking above the waves.

So, that’s project #1.

If you recall, I’m trying to improve my drawing skilz, using small mountains of random paper that I tore down to 8x10 sheets. The idea is to make one or two small drawings when I sit at my desk as warm up. This may seem like a reasonable thing for an artist to do, but it’s pretty new to me. Most of my drawings over the last ten years were made specifically to solve problems with a book, rough sketches evolve into finished work. I didn’t spend much time just doodling, except on vacations, when there was nothing else to do… which is a bit of a lie because I tend to start major writing projects while traveling because notebooks are tiny. What can I say, I’m restless.

But back to the warm up drawings… Part of my inspiration, other than my perpetual desire to draw better than I do, comes from looking at scans of some of my old images, stuff that I made in those wandering years between college and writing books. Since I didn’t know quite what to do at that time, I didn’t commit to anything, not completely, and so I was bit of a dabbler. Being a non-committal dabbler, I worked small and in many different ways I guess trying in a half-assed approach to find my voice. Of course, since I was going about it in a half-assed way, that wasn’t likely to happen. However, it did allow me to keep moving forward, stay foolishly optimistic that “one day” I’d figure things out and make a whole box full of crazy, diverse and good drawings. A box that was lost when my parents moved. Outside of a handful of scans, there’s a five or seven year hole in my drawing archive. Poof, gone. Part of my motivation with the new drawings is to get back some of that experimentation, most of it being in technique and style rather than in different media. I mean, the last year has proven on many occasions that I’m a guy who is in love with pens and pencils and that there’s no reason to dabble in anything else. Consequentially, it’s time to see if some of my neglected skills or interesting ideas from the past might pay off with what I’m doing now.

And oddly enough, that seems to be the case. As I said, Tom and I are working on a Rite of Spring picture book. He’s in research and writing mode and I’m sort of on hold… but as it turns out, not so much. I showed him a drawing (the one at the top of the post) and he was like, “You could do the whole book like that, with the outlines and stuff. You know, Art Nouveau.” Which I could and I should given the setting of our story, Paris in 1913. And suddenly, I had a flood of new ideas and designs, all based on that one drawing, knocked out in fifteen minutes, and Tom’s suggestion that I could use what I’d learned in making it and apply it to something bigger. How cool is that? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? I mean, I wasn’t expecting such a wonderful bit of insight that quickly, I did just start this new practice of messing around with warm up drawings, but I’m not going to let a quirky bit of inspiration pass by. Nope. I just can’t believe it’s paid off all ready. That said, you’re likely to see some rough drawings for the Stravinsky book in March.

My other news is that I get to pretend to have a real job for one afternoon in March. Professor Jamison Odone asked me to speak to his illustration students at Frostburg University. Yep, that means I have to explain how eating Pop Tarts and watching Varsity Blues leads to fully rendered, high concept, pen and ink illustrations in books about The Black Death… which is really just a metaphor for the triumph of Reason over fundamentalist ‘thinking’. And things of that ilk. Should be fun. And if I’ve learned anything from my previous outings, the more I plan, the worse I am… all stiff and unfunny. So, once I’ve gathered my visuals and drawings and whatnot, I’m just going to work from the most bare list of ideas and improvise. Woo! Go! Bobcats!

I keep thinking there is something else I need to tell you but other than me wishing I had a new desk and then realizing that such a wish is merely a projection of my desire to be something other than the awesome genius that I am, I’m sort of at a loss. I need a new desk like a need a hole in my head. What I need is someone to get behind one of my book ideas. The moment that happens, I’ll forget about new desk, shaving, eating, sleeping, moments of being sad inside… you know, dumb stuff.

Off to work.

What a Boring, Sunny February.

2012-02-07T15:33:00.004-05:00

Yep… not much to report. Just pluggin’ away.

The worst part of such quiet times is that it allows for all my faux psychological disorders to rear their ugly heads. Or it lets me have far too much time to over think absolutely everything. Yeah, the latter is more of the issue these days. Sure, I’m plowing ahead with my graphic novel mystery project and it’s taking shape, in fact, it’s starting to look a lot cooler than I’d thought, but while I’m bringing my A game to the work that matters, the back of mind is dithering away on thoughts that don’t.

Here’s my normal day… um, these days:

I get up, do my real life stuff and plunk down at the desk somewhere between 10 or 11. I pick out a CD to listen to and start working on whatever piece of paper is sitting before me. I have about 140 pages to create, so there’s a lot of work to be done, weeks and months of suffering, swearing and feeling like I’m on top of the world. That’s what I see stretching into the future.

But what I’m thinking about, in that dusty back-brain part of my tiny skull, is making drawings that will never see the light of day. Making, for lack of a better term, Art. How’s that for ridiculous? While I’m cranking away on my book, knowing that it will go somewhere and hopefully astound readers with its subtle beauty, I’m about a million miles away thinking about drawings that I am, quite literally, never going to make. It’s rather counter productive and the evidence of several years of lazy thinking on my part born from the misconception, made by me, that my “vocation” had the potential to be a “career”. In my attempt to process that rather big oops in logic, I got lost.

I’m a bit of a thinker. Not a brilliant thinker or anything like that, just a compulsive thinker. Being restless minded pays off at times, like I’m rarely bored… and I can conjure a story, research the crap out of it and put it into a logical form with almost no effort at all much to the delight of my readers. Those are the great times to be a little weird. The downside of being a compulsive thinker is when all that thinking just leads to more thinking. It’s like being lost at sea, dying of dehydration, and downing mouthful after mouthful of delicious salt water. That first gulp won’t kill you… well, not instantly, but those successive gulps will finish you off right quick.

When I get lost, creatively speaking, I start to over-think how to make things. It’s an old problem, which goes back to my pre-college days of painting, college classes and the fallow years before I figured out that I was supposed to be making books. Given all the time in the world and all the materials to fill a space the size of the Louvre with “stuff”, I will produce nothing of value. I guarantee it. As I’ve stated several times this last year, I’ve been good at forgetting this particular facet of my personality. Or ignoring the simple truth it belies.

So, it’s time to focus on the positive and productive facets of my personality, to stop drinking glass after glass of metaphorical sea water, regardless of how cool and salty it tastes.

When I am found, creatively speaking, I understand some simple truths about myself. The biggest one is that, relative to making an image, I suck at planning ahead. That may sound weird given that I spend a year or so making a book which obviously requires a great deal of planning; but in actuality, most of that time is spent taking ideas that arrive very quickly and completely and putting them in a from that makes sense to others. Essentially, I improvise then revise, with the bulk of the effort going into the revision. Most of the time spent making a book is spent doing the boring stuff, sort of like a paint-by-number or putting together a puzzle that you made and then cut into pieces. The bulk of the creative stuff happens quickly.

This is also true of the drawing that I do for myself (are you listening, Tim, this is point you so need to understand) and why I have files full of cool drawings from various times in my past. Basically, I’m only good at drawing from life. I know, go figure what with my formal training and countless hours spent doing just that. But seriously, there is something about limiting my time and materials that allows me to focus which simply does not happen when I am allowed to spend an unlimited amount of time thinking about how to get to work. Give me a sketchbook and a pocket full of pencils in the deserts of Arizona and a few hours to work and I’ll create a pile of cool drawings. Give me a camera with a handful of rolls of film and a bit of dying light and I’ll nail a few frames of perfect portraiture. I’m designed to work fast and to use the simplest materials possible. That’s how all the good stuff happens.

Give me unlimited time to create anything in the universe that I think is important or beautiful in any style or with any medium available and I’ll make absolutely nothing. That’s a fact. You can check it.

Since knowing is only half the battle, I have to win the other half, which is all about application.

Step one was when I locked all the painting supplies out of reach. In order to continue that line of thinking, I’m tossing the idea of making large drawings. It was great habit when I was 20 and my existence was about sitting around all day drawing whatever struck my fancy, but it’s not so useful now. The new rule of thumb, if it doesn’t fit in my awesome drawing box, then I don’t want it. I need to work small and fast, therefore, I will work small and fast.

And I guess we’ll see where that gets me.

Back to the Trenches.

2012-01-31T13:28:00.003-05:00

No, I don’t intend to remake The Letter Home or write a sequel. Well, I do in fact have a sequel in mind but it isn’t set during the war itself so it wouldn’t involve any trenches… though it would have a reference or two to the war and its aftermath. But I’m getting off track. What I meant by the title of this post is that I’m heading to the drawing board for three weeks of serious effort.

Yep, this is the return of my single-tasking soul. No more shuffling from project to project. No more wondering which project should be under my pen and which should be drying on the bed. If I’ve learned anything in the years that I’ve bashed away at turning my foolish notions into compelling stories, it’s that I suck at making decisions. Therefore, the most important decision that I need to make is the choice of the most promising project. I only need to make that decision and then run it into the ground. Run it into the ground and stomp on it.

Over the last few years, Mandy’s watched more NFL than she ever thought she would, though it did include the silver lining of initiating her deep love for all things Prince because of his Super Bowl halftime performance… but that’s neither here nor there. Being new to the sport, it took her a long time to understand why “that guy with the ball keeps running straight into that big bunch of guys and getting tackled.”

Of course, the role of the running back does seem like one set with a Sisyphusian task, one guy hoping to run through eleven guys and gain forward yardage. For Mandy, it seemed like madness and I’m sure she felt a little bit of pity for the poor RB, getting the ball and then getting battered, time and time again. I felt the same way when I was a little boy watching college football with my family. It seemed pointless. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I started to understand athletics on a philosophical level (never get me started on sports and economics because then I just get pissed off and rant…). What I came to understand, philosophically, was that there are rare moments of perfection that occur in sports and that’s what the big deal is all about, though your normal, beer swilling fan probably doesn’t comprehend that on a conscious level. And that perfection is born of sheer willpower channeled through an undeniable application of physical and mental work.

This is where we get return to the running back and Mandy’s illumination and the point to all this rambling in a blog about being an illustrator/writer; it’s all about yards per carry. Sure, that running back might get smashed in the backfield for a loss. Or he might get stuffed at the line of scrimmage, down after down, in what seems like a meaningless struggle, like trying to hold back the tides. But there’s method to the madness. That method is based on the simple notion that, over time, over many attempts, the running back will reach or exceed the average yards per carry. Depending on one’s sources, the average yards per carry of an NFL running back is something like (the internet is terrible place to look for useful statistics, go figure…) 3.6. So, by putting his head down and running forward, ever forward, your RB is likely to get you 3.6 yards closer to the goal line. Do that twice and you’re 7.2 yards closer… or just 2.8 yards away from a first down, which would allow you to take four more stabs at moving the ball closer to scoring. It’s not elegant or beautiful. It’s simple attrition. If I have the ball and I send my running back into the fray, odds are that he’ll get me just that much closer to where I want to be. Do it enough times, and I’ll score. Or, more than likely, do it enough times and it will open other options that weren’t available when I started the game. Drive forward enough times and you get to where you want to go. Simple attrition.

And that’s where I am on my current project, the mystery book that might end up as an online thing if I can’t find a home for it. There’s nothing beautiful or elegant going these days or for the next three weeks. I have one project sitting before me, like my running back, and I’m just going to hand him the ball, day after day. Some days, I’ll lose ground. Others, I’ll see something spectacular and things will go far beyond my wildest dreams. But most likely, I’ll get 3.6 yards per carry and inch my way toward the the end zone.

That’s life in the trenches. Time is measured in weeks, progress in inches.

Oh, Mandy also wanted me to note that, when I mentioned my a-ha moment from last week, in which I decided to use images I’d already drawn to make MoCCA Fest merch, that it was her encouragement of my idea that really put things in motion. I certainly did not mean to take all the credit. And she did suffer looking through many folders and files of drawings trying to find things that caught her eye and which may catch the eyes of others. All that and she only has one more football game left to ignore... for this season…

A Whole Lot of Nothing...

2012-01-24T15:05:00.003-05:00

Another Tuesday’s bashed its way into my life. And a sunny day at that. Where is the snow? Where is the bleak? Where’s the weekend? Whatever.

So… the update. Um. Not much to report.

Basically, I’m still slogging through stuff for the MoCCA Fest thing while trying desperately to get to my book projects. Turns out that I’m not much of a merch savvy artist. Of course, I knew that going into this, but I figured that with my genius and ingenuity, I would rally and make some awesome stuff. And that stuff that I’m working on is awesome; but it’s going too slow, taking too long and keeping me from spending time/effort on things of greater importance.

Stumped about the whole thing, I tossed an idea to Mandy and she said I should run with it: use some of the many drawings in my files as the design stuff for bookmarks, postcards, etc. Why make new images when I have, quite literally, hundreds of unused ideas just sitting there doing nothing, not unlike Congress these days? Consequently, we sat down and opened folder after folder, pulling various drawings (as seen above) to be scanned and turned into something “marketable”. It’s a project that will require time and rethinking, as far as how to take images made for this or that and turn them into something new, but that’s still far less annoying as trying to make new work.

Hopefully, by the next time I rant, I’ll be well on my way to never thinking about this stuff again. I know, it’s such a simple notion, using drawings that already exist, how did I not think of it before? Ugh, if I could understand any of the nonsense swirling in my brain…

The new goal is to focus on the bright side of this latest realization, that I am back to the book work. Considering that making books is the only thing I do extremely well, it’s about damn time.

So, the book front:

The Punk Ethic is inching toward existing. In a little more than two months, it will be out there. Why, then even you will be able to buy and read it. How weird is that? After you read it, I expect feedback… don’t leave me hanging.

The Salem Witch book continues to get no love from the publishing world. This isn’t surprising. It’s not an easy story and Jamie and I are not about to dumb things down. I respect the intellect of children far too much to make something that isn’t going to completely light up their peanut-sized brains and universe-sized imaginations. But we’re not giving up. It will find a home or get retooled… then find a home. I’m that confident.

Meanwhile, I’m plowing ahead with my mysterious graphic novel-ish project that I’ve been hinting about for the last year. I have all the paper that I’ll need, which is fantastic. I have a new design, the fourth if you’re keeping track, which seems to be both manageable and interesting. The new goal is this: knock out ten or so finished pages and see if I can get any interest in the book from a publisher (which would be fantastic as well) but if I can’t, I’ll start posting it as a serial graphic novel online as I originally intended. If all goes according to schedule, I’ll have my sample pages out the door by the end of February.

And because I’m a picture book maker, I need a picture book project on my desk or I start to go slightly mad. Right now, that project is all about the very first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. I know, it’s not a typical subject for a children’s book but when has anything I’ve touched been even close to being called “typical”. Anyway, it’s a project near and dear to my heart and that of my nephew, Tom, who I’ve roped into writing the text. Given our constant obsession with all things music (well… not contemporary Christian {or any contemporary religious music now that I think about}), we’re completely jazzed to make this odd moment in history come alive and are eye-ball deep in research rapture. Turns out Stravinsky was a weird dude. Shocker.

I guess the only other thing to note is to acknowledge the death of painting for me. Yeah, it’s just not happening. I’m pretty bummed about it. However, I grew so despondent about not being a painter that I bought a whole bunch of tiny notebooks and started writing a novel. I figure that if I’m not going to paint, despite having the time, materials and ideas to do so, that I should write something new. And, as you might have expected, the new story just started pouring onto the page, almost without effort. Apparently, I’m a writer, not a painter. Of course, you already knew that. But I’d forgotten. Again, if I could understand any of the nonsense swirling in my brain…

Thank the Lord for Saint Thomas… Brady…

2012-01-17T15:16:00.001-05:00

Apparently, God is on the side of the dude married to an angel. Like we didn’t know that already.

But back to my life, which is far more interesting than any silly, NFL playoff game. Er, maybe not.

Somehow I forgot to plan for a long, holiday weekend, which completely derailed my rather loose schedule of sitting at my desk for an unhealthy amount of time. Instead, I found myself un-decorating and then cleaning the apartment. So… I don’t have much to report but I do feel as though we can use the kitchen again and that no one will die from some peculiar bacterial contamination. Nothing like the unglamorous side of being a starving artist. But I’ll save the exciting stories of cleaning the bathroom for another time.

I did manage to spend a few minutes doing something that I talked about at the end of last year: actually drawing stuff for myself. I fired up the drawing box, sharpened a 3B pencil to a fine point and had at it for no other reason than I could. And of course, the drawings worked out better than I’d expected. How annoying is that? I mean, I spent a big chunk of 2011 trying my hand at stuff I used to be good at: painting, stenciling, photography, etc; only to find that I have very little interest in such things… and then, I sit down to draw and cha-ching, everything works like a dream. It’s good for my vocation but it’s as annoying as hell at times.

But I’m getting whiny about nothing so I’ll stop. Gotta focus on the positive. I drew just to draw. Which really is my strong suit and probably always has been. Let’s take a trip down memory lane…

As a teenager, I was convinced that I would be a painter because it’s what I did most nights between the hours of 10 PM to 2 AM, even on school nights. In fact, especially on school nights because weekends were all about being a social monster. But now that I think about it, drawing was the escape during the long hours of the day. Despite my good grades and manifold participation in all things high school, I was a lackluster student simply because I didn’t really buy into it. But I was a fantastic draughtsman in the making. And since I didn’t seem to need to spend a lot of energy making honor roll or doing extra curricular activities (to spend more time with girls rather than look good on the old high school transcript), I had extra energy to put into the doodles on the clipboard I toted through the halls.

When I entered college, I was still convinced I would be a painter. But, being a freshman, I had to take drawing 101 and all that other gen ed. crap. I was still trying to work the painter angle when I stepped into my first life drawing class and suddenly everything clicked. From that first day, I was hooked on drawing. Of course, I worked past the simple notion of drawing a nude figure in an abstract space to making drawings that were more meaningful to me and to others; but that was the first time that I felt like I was doing work that was “fulfilling”. And so, during those years, drawing was all I did. Sure, I met my curriculum requirements of painting, watercolor, photography and sculpture as well as all the art history and theory nonsense; but as in high school, drawing was the escape. The big difference was that drawing became an end goal as well.

And I guess it still is. Go figure. Even though I didn’t do the stuff I thought I would this past weekend, it turns out that I did the stuff that I needed to. Funny how that works out.

*As shown in this 1997 photo by Adam Yake, I was the guy who would wear his own band’s shirt… which is somehow worse than being covered, head to toe in charcoal.

Someone Remind Me...

2012-01-10T16:42:00.009-05:00

… that I am not a rock star. Anyone, please? Thank you.

Ugh. Now that that’s taken care of, let’s get into the real stuff. After a month or so of me trying to figure out how to make saleable merch for the 2012 MoCCA Fest, and failing mightily I must say, I’ve returned to basics: pen & ink. It’s what I do, whether I’m tremendously good at it or not, and I should just run with it for as long as I possibly can.

December was a less than productive month simply because I spent the better part of it worrying about how to make cool things and present myself at this indie comic/cartoon thing (MoCCA Fest)… which doesn’t actually happen until April. I figured that if I started early, I could knock out a lot of stuff long before I’d need it and be ready should anything unforeseeable occur. And it was wise that I did because the ‘unforeseeable’ was my lack of talent or interest or whatever in making useless crap to sell in the vain attempt to impress people that I’ve never met. I must have been on crack when I came up with that one. However, since I was smart enough to run into this problem months before it could literally become a problem, I have more than enough time to give up all my idiotic ideas and focus on what I actually do, day in day out. My drawing and writing are what I want people to see and respond to in the first place, right?

So, instead of making: woodcuts, watercolors, stencil posters, beer cozies knit from human hair or life-size butter sculptures of Katy Perry… wait, I still might try that last one… I’ve started making pen & ink drawings. I will admit, I was getting desperate. I was worried that I wouldn’t make anything cool and that even attending the MoCCA Fest was going to be an epic fail on my part simply because I don’t fit the standard definition of a comic or cartoon artist. But then I thought about it and remembered that I don’t fit the standard definition of a children’s book illustrator, so who cares? Again, it’s time to keep in mind that I’m not a rock star. Which is very cool, because that means unlimited freedom to bring whatever I want to the table. Well, in this specific case, half a table. I’ll show up with my books and drawings and if people like them, fantastic, if not, fantastic. I’m officially moving beyond my useless concerns on this topic.

The funny/annoying thing was that as soon as I decided that I was done trying to redefine my artistic persona to fit that particular comic-ish/cartoon-ish/indie-ish niche and sat down to ink the first image, all the stress vanished and all the excitement returned. And I mean instantly. That excitement, those first dabs of ink, opened the door to The Zone and everything clicked.

I figure this is a perfect opportunity to show you how things get done, most of the time. When I work with pen & ink, one of two things occurs, either I just dive right in with the ink and see where things go or I make a loose pencil sketch which then gets buried by ink. The former is usually what I do when I draw things for myself because it’s unforgiving, one mistake and show’s over. The latter is how I usually do my book illustrations. As much fun as it would be to wing it for the illustrations of a big project, I rather like having a pencil sketch to rely on simply because the number of hours required to finish a drawing almost guarantees that I will forget something that I really want to have in the image. Plus, it allows me to work faster with fewer mistakes.

Here you go, the first sketch for what I guess you’d call a small poster. The finished image will be 11 x 14 inches. Anyway, this won’t be the greatest drawing in the world but it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to fit the confines of the design and provide the basic proportions/gesture of the figure.

Then I make a rather vague pencil drawing on my inking paper. Again, when I draw for myself, I tend to take my pencil work a lot further, not so much in a photographic rendering sort of way since I find tonality rather boring, but I will battle for hours to find the perfect line to say what I need. I’m a sucker for a sensuous line. But since this thing is going to be covered in ink, it doesn’t really matter. In fact, the less I put down, the better. Even though graphite and ink are both lumped together as drawing materials, the difference between how the two really work or look is quite profound and I try very hard not to attempt the foolish mistake of bringing aspects of one medium to the other. Doing that only leads to disappointment. Less is far more in preliminary drawings.

Three hours of inking and I’m nearly done with this poor guy. I still need to add the text and the background/foreground design elements but that stuff goes a bit faster than all the detail work in the main figure. Drawing mud is easier than drawing a helmet.

As I’ve mentioned before, I usually work on more than one image at a time because I have to let the ink dry, so this is the other 11 x 14 inch poster currently under construction on my desk. Same deal, the first image is the rough pencil drawing, the second is the vague pencil sketch slowly succumbing to the inexorable march of Speedball India ink.

And that’s where I’m going to leave you this week because I need to go and finish this stuff. But I promise to show you the conclusion to this fascinating topic next week.

Oo! And I decided to go with crappy photos rather than scanning these images because it makes me feel like I’m still in touch with my DIY/grunge roots. I'll scan the finished drawings next week.

Yeah! Happy New Year moving on to more important stuff like me talking about me…

2012-01-03T15:33:00.005-05:00

But first, a winter scene:

Sorry for not posting last week, it turns out that the Amish have yet to perfect a computer that doesn’t run on whoopee pies and handmade bread. You’d think they’d have figured it out by now but that is not the case. But I’m back in the JC and ready to take the new year by the stones.

Today will be spent getting everything in my tiny world back in order. There’s an amazing amount of stuff piled on my desk and all of it needs a home, even if that home is the recycle bin. By this afternoon, I’ll be back in the swing of things.

So… what do I have to offer to you about my professional life these days…? Hm. Well, over the holidays, I spent a considerable amount of time in my father’s dark room which confirmed a notion that’s been slowly developing in my brain for awhile: I can’t really focus when I work with other people. That’s not to say that I don’t like doing stuff with others. My friend, Adam, and I had a blast printing old negatives and I enjoyed helping my dad rework some of his prints; but none of that was “work”. It was just fun. And I’m sure that if I had some new negatives from which to print or was trying to be a photographer, I would have been able to get some “work”… but I didn’t and I’m not.

Now this thinking 86-ed my dreamy, faux-egalitarian belief that I can work anywhere. Sure, I can draw anything anywhere, but that’s drawing and not “working”. There’s a subtle distinction between the two activities. It turns out that I probably do need to be able to throw on the headphones or shut a door and be in my own little world. The notion of me cranking out books in a room with my family and friends going about their noisy and awesome lives is very much dead and gone. Which is very annoying.

Anyway, as usual, time spent in the dark room felt productive even if it was just printing stuff to be seen only by the crazy people weird enough to spend 18+ hours in a tiny, chemically perfumed, red-lit room. I think that being in the dark room is as close as I’ve ever come to having a “studio”. Obviously, in my Jersey City life and all my previous lives, there was literally no room to make a studio. Space has always been in short supply. But the lesson that I need to learn from the dark room is to create an area, even if it is the corner of my bedroom, where the only thing that can happen is “work”. I mean, it’s quite obvious with film photography: you process film and print photographs in the dark room because it’s the only place where you can process film and make prints. Because it’s such a single purpose space, it’s almost impossible not to be productive. If you go into the dark room, you will make something photography related. You can’t go into the dark room and get distracted by painting or doing the dishes or worrying about nonsense on the internet. All you can do is make negatives or prints. It’s that simple.

The trick, it seems, is to bring that kind of thinking to the real world. Sure, it would be easier if I had a studio that was an damn-near empty room in a building other than the one where I live… thus creating a space where the only thing to do would be to sit my butt down and make drawings; but that’s not the situation I have going for me. So, I get to see if I can conjure the mental fortitude… or delusion, which would allow me to take the sunny corner of my bedroom, right next to the burny radiator and make that the only few square feet on the planet that really mean anything.

As always, the problem comes down to how do I create a mental construct through which I can channel my attention on something as weird as making pen & ink drawings.

Plus, as my dad pointed out, if I had an ideal studio situation I would be bored and get nothing done. I like having to fight against limitations. It’s what I do.

Hm. Oh well, off to build a studio in my mind.

Yeah… Two Days Late, Whatever.

2011-12-22T15:22:00.001-05:00

Like you guys aren’t annoyingly busy these days as well.

Not much to report on the book front. I’m in the wilds of suburban Pennsyltucky, bundled-up against this dreary 65 degree heat, doing all the holiday/family stuff that seems to creep up every twelve months or so.

But I will say this, anytime I go xmas tree hunting and don’t have to wear my perfect, winter hat and don’t need to thaw my hands and feet when I'm done, feels a little less than xmas-esque. However, this was Mandy’s first year to be the poor sucker to pick out the tree and face the potential wrath of my mother for bringing home something too Charlie Brown-ish, a bullet that Mandy dodged by bringing home two trees, which I think sums up the typical American take on the holidays.

I have my drawing box in tow. I managed to get it out for a few hours and drew at the kitchen table, which is where I drew my very first book… though in a different house. As per usual, I worked until long after everyone went to sleep. As I grew weary, I decided to take a step back and see what I’d accomplished and, of course, as I looked over each drawing with a critical eye, I couldn’t help wonder why I get caught up in nonsense about painting or photography or print making or etc. They weren’t great drawings but they were pretty good. But that’s what happens when it’s a good drawing night. Too bad this is not the season to string a few dozen good drawing nights together to make a great drawing month. Or two. Or six.

I guess that’s what will happen in 2012.

Anyway, yeah, um… that’s all I have today.

"I sent wave after wave of my own men knowing full well that eventually the killbots would reach their kill limit and shut down."

2011-12-13T14:09:00.009-05:00

I’ve spent the last week dealing with a faux psychological issue before it becomes a full blown fake psychological condition. Somewhere along the way, I started hoarding art supplies like I grew up in The Depression. How weird is that? It’s definitely a new thing, new as in since I wrote the Boston Massacre book new. I can’t tell if it’s my reaction to the troubling world economy, the tumbling state of publishing or just me looking at the difference betwixt the in-flow of cash pie versus the out-flow of cash pie as a professional illustrator. But whatever it is, it sucks and needs to go away.

I think I was aware of it for a while but I didn’t really see it as a problem until recently. Of course, because I tend to be dramatic, allow me to dissuade you of the notion that there are rooms so packed with paper that they are ready to collapse and kill the unwary or that I’m working on the back of matchbook covers so that I don’t use any of my precious materials. It’s not that bad. We’re talking about a few stacks of paper, barely more than a year old, that don’t even fill an entire flat file shelf. No one else on the planet would even bother to think of this in terms of mental tribulation. There’s no need to send me the e-application for that Hoarders show. Or any other reality show for that matter.

However, there is something rather insidious about letting this paper go unused for so long and I intend to nip this issue in the bud. Basically, it comes down to not making enough drawings to improve my skilz, sharpen my ideas or work through all the glorious mistakes that the artistic process requires. It’s very simple reasoning. The less mucking about you do, the less cool stuff you make. Apparently, as I’ve entertained various tangents with painting, photography, printing and all that other nonsense that I’ve hinted about during the last year or so, I’ve slowly done less and less drawing. As I said, I have no clear idea as to why, but to allow this behavior to continue will only lead to bad things.

So… the cure, as with all creative endeavors, is to do the thing that you haven’t been doing. And that’s what I’ve done. Instead of getting a sheet of paper, preparing it to become a fancy, finished drawing that I can… um… maybe turn into a book or hide in my files, I grabbed a whole pad of paper and started making messy drawings. Most went into the recycling pile; but a few were good enough to develop into something better. And since better is where I’m trying to go every time I sit down to work, I grew more excited and invested, thus making more drawings. It’s a brutal process of attrition, but there’s no way around it, I mean, other than to be a perfect genius draftsman. I am not a perfect genius draftsman. But I am more than willing to sacrifice drawing after drawing to get what I’m after. Somehow, I’d forgotten that fact.

The funny thing is that I was always pretty good at working for the sake of work. As a teenager with a complex social life combined with vast amounts of time spent painting (way back then, before cell phones and IM there were whole hours in a day when you weren’t in contact with your friends, which was awesome because it allowed all sorts of fiction and trauma to take seed, grow and make life wildly interesting… which was perfect for a kid who wanted to make Art), I cruised through paints and canvas with alarming speed. In fact, for a few years, that’s all that my family bought me for birthdays and xmases. It’s only lately that I’ve stopped working so fast and furious. College was a slaughterhouse for art supplies, simply because all I did, day in and day out, was make stuff. That was my sole purpose for getting an education and I was nothing if not a dedicated student. I may not have attended every class, or in some cases many classes, but I took the work seriously and always got things done on time and to the best of my growing ability. Even post college, I was a productive fiend, though almost entirely in the field of photography. Before writing my books, most of my “success” as an artist came from taking and printing hundreds of photographs and landing shows, which required a General Ulysses S. Grant-like mentality of attrition and results.

Maybe it’s living here, on the cusp of NYC at this point in history as a rather obscure talent in a befuddled profession that has made me more cautious with my materials. Or perhaps it’s me coping with the fact that publishing is a lottery and like most lotteries, has everything to do with luck, most of it being not statistically on my side. But really, none of that matters. It’s not like anything I do is expensive. Writing is free and my budget on paper and pencils barely reaches $100 a year. I pay more for my Netflix than I do for my drawing supplies.

It’s that logic which allowed me to stop being an idiot and start cranking out drawings. And that’s important because I have texts and ideas in need of illustrations. 2012 is going to be a good year as far as projects go. Everything I have lined up excites and inspires me. And that means I want you to see it as well.

Off to mess up a whole murder of paper. Or murder a whole mess of paper, whichever you prefer.

Does anything cool ever happen in the second week of December…?

2011-12-06T13:56:00.002-05:00

Let’s see, I have nothing. Somewhere in the last week, I worked on drawings for people who need some drawings and got all of the flat files up and running… and that’s about it. I have no idea where the week went but I’m pretty exhausted. I must have gone xmas shopping at some point because there’s a pile of gifts, all wrapped and pretty, in the corner of the room but I barely remember that as well. At this point, you could tell me that Santa brought them and I couldn’t really deny it.

The Salem Witch dummy book continues to prowl the world at large. The punk book continues to become ever more real as the clock counts down to an April release date. My graphic novella still sticks its tongue out at me when I try to make it work. And I’m slowly, very slowly putting together stuff for the 2012 MoCCA Fest, fearing that I’m either making the lamest of stuff or too little stuff or too much stuff. I’m sure it will all work out, but not before the 17th, when I traipse off to Pennsylvania for my holiday vacation with the family. Not that I won’t get something accomplished there, I’ll have access to my dad’s dark room, but it will be a break from my desk and all the assorted ephemera of my artistic career.

Thank heavens I have my drawing box to carry with me…

My nephew chimed in that my blogging tends to be inversely proportionate to my focus on the project at hand, meaning, that the more work I have to do, the less verbose I tend to be when I type away about nothing. If that is the case, this post should be well over ten pages long and Proust or Tolstoy would weep and beg for mercy from my unrelenting wave of asides, tangents and run-on sentences.

I probably lost so much time this week, when I say “lost” I mean time spent at the desk doing something important I’m sure, while my mind is a thousand miles away contemplating something that is certainly unimportant, wondering about my eternal battle with Art. 2011, for me, has been the year of stupid artistic ideas. And apparently, it will continue to be until the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.

We all know that making books is my thing. However, we all know that being a boring person who never tries anything new, even if no one else ever gets to see it, will eventually leads to madness and lame ideas. So I figure that I’m either damned if I do and damned if I don’t with this messing around with other media and other means of expression beyond writing and drawing. Until this year, I was fairly satisfied with being damned that I didn’t try my hand at other skilz that I’d let grow rusty and weed choked, like painting, watercolor and photography. My thinking was how bad could being damned be if I had some pretty cool books to show for it?

I think it was easier to maintain that puritanical focus on writing and drawing before I fully understood the reality of the publishing world… that you’re far more likely to vanish in the vast sea of unread, newly printed books, than be “successful”. Not that I expected to grow all rich and such, but whatever I thought was a barely formed illusion. The reality is you work because you have to work to stay sane. If something comes of it, the reward is very likely to be small, though I don’t mean to discount the profound value of the small gifts that the universe can supply. Last week, I received a small reward when I got a call from a friend who told me that his nephew was overheard, while drawing at a table with his siblings, that he was going to make drawings in Timothy Decker style. That sort of perfect moment can keep me going for months. Stuff like that is awesome, but it is rare. As for large, more culturally-understandable, acceptable and desired rewards, I know nothing about them.

And all that learning about how the world really functions led me to a year of wondering just what it is I’m doing. Some stuff, I’ve figured out. I’ve gotten over the idea of throwing in the towel and pretending that I’ll never write or draw anything ever again. That simply isn’t me. And I know that I will continue to make stories and get them out there, regardless of how the industry changes or how technology prances along since neither affect me as I spend day after day dipping a steel pen point into a jar of ink like Bob Cratchit. I’ll just plow right on with my ideas.

But as for all the paint and art materials laying about the room, unused, and staring at me like that freaked-out squirrel that Tom let into the apartment yesterday afternoon… What happens with them remains to be seen. Maybe something awesome, perhaps something terrible or, then again, maybe nothing at all.

Phase One of Thanksmas Eve... Survived.

2011-11-29T12:07:00.007-05:00

The only bright spot, professionally speaking, about the Thanksgiving weekend is the sale on art supplies. I mean, there is no way to get anything done when I’m all napping by the fire, drunk on perfect apple pie and driving from one event to another in an endless parade of small talk. But I could and did take advantage of the Black Friday savings to pick up paper. And oil paints… I know, I know, what am I going to do with those? Ugh. Maybe I shouldn’t even mention the lovely boards that my dad gave me so that I can make woodcuts. It’s funny, that I feel guilty about buying art supplies, like I just bought a baby or weapon-grade anthrax in a back alley. Of course, this guilt is completely self-generated. Whatever, moving on.

Check this out!

It’s a handmade drawing box, whipped up by my father, for me to carry around like some posturing artist. Screw iPads and crappy stuff that just plays movies and books to distract oneself all day long. Now I have a hella cool way to carry my paper and pencils without fear of crushed corners, dings or scratches. I just pick up my drawing box, toss it in a bag and I am off. You guys know how much I like simplicity. This is as basic as it gets. Well... maybe a bit classy with that charming Mucha design, but it also has a plexi glass sheet to use as a drawing board and interior folders for dividing papers… so I can have a folder of clean paper, a folder for drawings, etc. Or just separate papers by species as I am wont to do: sketch paper, inking paper, fancy paper, blah blitty blah blah blah. And, should I decide not to pack it to the gills with paper, I can even use it to carry and protect my Darth Vader pencil case too.

You have no idea how much I sort of wish that I could get it into my brain and my illustrator’s vision to work on such a small scale that this box is the only studio furniture that I require. It’s never going to happen, but I sort of get all dreamy-eyed when I think of a world in which I just sit wherever I find a place for my butt, plunk down, open this box and get to work. A world without limits. A world without desk issues. Ah… such a sweet dream.

Other than that, I’m just trying to figure out what to do next. Or just this week. Or just this afternoon. Usually, this leads to making a list that will get far too long and end up in the trash, but atleast I’ll know most of what I need to get done and have some idea of how long I can spend on each project. At present, I have three projects to pick from: stuff for MoCCA Fest (drawings, posters, bookmarks, etc.), my mystery project (which, as it is not going to be a web comic, I’m going to call, from this point on, a graphic novella) and coming up with an actual web comic.

I have a lot of ideas for MoCCA Fest, I just need to make them come into being. My trick, since selling little things at the festival is all about mass production, is to make photographs of drawings. It still feels like cheating, but given my access to a dark room and my skilz with photography, it’s cost effective and easy. Far easier and cheaper than sending images out to be printed. And really, it’s the same thing, a crappy reproduction of an original image, however, in my case, I’ll be hand printing the reproductions, which makes my stuff that much cooler. If I keep telling myself that, I don’t feel like this whole MoCCA Fest is a horrible mistake in the making. That said, I’m still looking for ideas of things to make that would appeal in the $5 to $10 range to people who, in all likelihood, are the same sort of people who make it a point to read this blog on a regular basis. Feel free to offer any idea that you think don’t suck or that I could conceivable do. Like, for instance, I have a fear of power tools, so making oak napkin holders or wooden bowls are terrible ideas.

Then there is the graphic novella. I’m on my fourth or fifth layout design. I think this one works. It has more room for images without being too large to actually finish in my lifetime. Plus, it allows for my text to stay in a little novella chunks rather than expanding it into an boring novel or condensing it into a shallow graphic novel. I mean really, it’s quite rare for a graphic novel to work on several levels at once. Not that graphic novelist can’t create great stuff, but I fear that the average graphic novel reader is used to the watered down crap created by the graphic novel market in its haste to make money and not art. But anyway, I’ve decided that 2012 is the year that I finish my graphic novella. Whether I find a home for it or get paid for it remains to be seen. As usual, I really don’t care about that. I just want to make this really cool story work and once it does, we’ll see what happens. I’m inching near the tipping point from which the whole thing will come together… though after many months of inking. Of course, I’ll keep you posted.

Which leaves me in need of a web comic. I have an idea. I have characters. What I don’t have, beyond a cohesive design but whatever, is the purpose of the web comic. I sort of need a clearly defined purpose for my work or I just fumble about making a whole lot of nothing. As I look at the bijillion web comics out there, I can only recognize two kinds: the “I really want to show you how clever I am” comics and the “this is a just an online soap opera for indie kids who live in world of pop cultural references and probably need to be ‘less connected’ and should go do something useful with their lives”. I think it’s obvious that neither of those appeal to me. In fact, the soap opera stuff makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit so that’s completely off the table. So, I’m left with only two options: make a clever comic or create something different. My issue with the clever comic is that I might not actually be clever in comic form and that I don’t really like being thought of as “clever”. That sort of “clever” always seems lazy or self indulgent. As for creating something different… hm. The greatest problem of that is coming up with something new (and of course I realize that I’m not going to invent a whole new form of communication but you know what I mean). Plus, new is not what people are looking for, which makes it very hard to find or just stumble upon. People are looking for clever comics and soap operas, so those are the most successful species. Or because people only make clever or soap opera comics, that's all people think to look for… or something. Weird stuff that doesn’t fit into those neat categories doesn’t attract the same number of readers and usually dies off. There are times when I wonder if I should put any effort into this nonsense.

At any rate, that’s what I’m thinking about as I sit here and stare at this little stack of canvases and handful of tubes of oil paint. And for those of you who are worried about it, I promise not to eat any of the paint or drink any linseed oil no matter how good it smells or how much I want to. I’m a big boy now.

Pre-Holiday Doldrums...

2011-11-22T11:20:00.003-05:00

Finally, a November day with white, rainy skies. This is one of the perfect days. Well, it could be a touch colder, but I’m not that picky. There’s very beautiful light easing through the windows. It’s a gentle light that seems to pause just before touching everything in the room. It’s a very polite light.

So, I’m inspired today. But the holidays are working against me. Sure, I’ll get my comic done for my Timothy Decker website and I’ll put a few hours work into the random drawings on my desk, but there’s far too much to do in order to get on the road tomorrow evening and drive to PA and then blow through three days of craziness and a lot more driving before coming home on Sunday. Thanksgiving is a deceptively short holiday and tends to sucker people into over-planning what they can get done. It quickly loses its vacation appeal and becomes a mess of seeing this person or that person and having event piled on event piled on event. And then it’s Monday and everyone is miserable. One of these days I’ll have to extend my Saying No to Everything behavior to the Thanksgiving long weekend and see how that works out.

But I’m not really getting much done beyond reorganizing my art supplies in the wake of months of witch book drawing and the addition of the new flat filing cabinets. You wouldn’t think it would take weeks to clear up what would seem to be such a little mess, but it’s a lot harder than you would imagine when you can’t put anything anywhere for fear of bugs or because the shelves that you need are not actually assembled. Suddenly, any flat surface becomes a staging area. And then you have to orchestrate which staging area has priority over others. Without fail, something I needed or wanted was at the bottom of a stack of things I should just throw away. Or I’d only find half of a project… the other half is… somewhere? I don’t like to operate like that. However, slowly, things are coming together. The bookshelves are all organized and clean and, knock on wood, book lice free. Half of the flat files are up and running, which holds most of my real work. I haven’t labeled anything yet because nothing is in its permanent location, so despite the fact that all my materials are now protected and bug free, I really don’t know exactly where anything is. Fortunately, the drawers open on nice, silent ball bearings so I don’t feel too bad about having to open each one just to find what I’m looking for… wow this is a boring post.

So, progress. I just sent all the high resolution scans of the illustrations for the punk book off to my art director. That might actually mean that, as far as the visual aspects of this book go, that I’m done. And it only took seven years. As far as the punk book goes, I’m turning my attention to making one or two book trailers to put on my various websites and youtube. Will anyone look at it? I have no idea. But if I don’t make it, then I’m 100% certain that they won’t. And what’s the point of that? And what’s the point of having a fancy laptop if I don’t use it to make a silly book trailer? So, that’s my goal for December. Obviously, my devoted fans and blog stalkers will get the first opportunity to see whatever nonsense I come up with. Part of the fun of making a book trailer is recording music for it. Yep, we’re getting the band back together. More on that later, after I have a few weeks to work though the embarrassment of being a 37 year old wanker who wants to write crappy punk rock songs about geology, biogeography and its effects on speciation and such. The only thing I’ll say is that we have brand new “used” 4 track recorders and we’re not afraid to use them. If we can find blank tapes. (One of the cool parts of living in the slightly impoverished part of the JC is that I can walk into a store and buy blank tapes. It’s almost like living in a Third World country without having to exchange your currency.)

Off to draw then drive then eat then sleep then drive and back to drawing. At least there will be some apple pie involved with the whole mess. That might make up for all the crazy.

Endgame in the War Against the Book Lice…

2011-11-15T23:24:00.006-05:00

Or Tim Needs Things To Do.

OK, for the first time since I discovered the book lice infestation way back in July, I was able to bring the full weight of my attention to the subject. And because of a coincidental bit of luck, Mandy was forced to help me take my war to the very heart of those skeezy little devils’ hideout in our storage/library/crap room.

On Friday, I received and email from Mandy (she was at work… at least one of us earns a normal wage in these sad economic times) asking if I would like two sets of steel, flat file shelves for free. For those of you that don’t know what flat files are, google it. I kid, I kid… Flat files are pretty much what they sound like, filing cabinets that are huge and squished, which means they are designed to hold big sheets of paper. Lots of paper. Basically, if you ever find yourself in a gallery office or a really cool library or the hinterland of museum or in a studio of an art school or at a classy architecture firm or the home of a successful artist, you will find flat files. They’re big, heavy, strong, archival and fairly expensive, at least at my current level of success in the marketplace. To be asked, out of the blue, if I’d like two sets of files all for the price of getting a zipcar (in reality, a ziptruck) was fantastic. The problem, other than wondering if we’d even be able to move them as we didn’t have any details on their brand which meant that they could have weighed as much as 300 pounds, was that we needed somewhere to put the flat files in our apartment. They have a pretty big footprint and we have limited space. Our storage room was the only place that made any sense, but in order to do that, we had to clean it and anti-bug spray it until the room was like Hell on Earth for book lice. And that’s what we did. And then I went on a mini quest, got the shelves and found out that I need a few boards so that the files can rest comfortably on one another… which leaves our apartment in a state of disarray and me calling my dad with yet another project for him and his wood shop. I’m so glad that Thanksgiving is right around the corner.

But I do own flat files. And you know how excited I get about storing my stuff. These new shelves completely dwarf the wooden shelves I had made, by my father, this summer. In fact, I’m nearly 100% certain that I can store every scrap of artwork that I’ve made since I was fifteen in just three of the shelves. That would leave me with seven shelves for all my current work, which I guestimate will only require three. So, I have like four shelves just waiting to be filled with who knows what. Candy, maybe.

The nice thing about all this flat file pre-cleaning activity is that it took my mind off the fact that I’m sort of spinning my wheels. As I mention last week, I’m in a holding pattern for the Salem book and winding down the stuff that needs to be done on the punk book (which has an April 1st release date if I hadn’t mentioned that before). Obviously, this is the time to start the next project. Beginning projects is always the worst, simply because they are projects without weight. One second it may seem cool, the next, it’s the worst idea ever. There simply isn’t enough project there to either hold my interest or make me feel guilty that I haven’t finished it already. I haven’t put enough effort into any of my rough projects to really feel compelled to work like an insane person. It will happen, eventually.

In order to fill my free time, I started looking for the perfect desk. I know, there is no perfect desk. And I don’t really like desks. But I needed something to do that felt “productive”. For three days, I agonized over desks. My thinking was that if I’m going to spend a huge portion of life sitting in one place, I should really, really like that place. It should feel like home and be cool and strike fear and awe into all those who sit before it. Or just be extremely functional. I had myself convinced that I was going to have a grown-up person’s desk and that I’d start 2012 like a super professional. I wasn’t completely certain as to which desk to buy, something olde fashioned or something sleek and new; but I was going to get something. Then that whole flat file thing dropped in my lap. With it, went all the square feet necessary for a grown-up desk. Three days of useless research and agonizing disappeared like a morning mist. I’m left sitting at my augmented Camp Hill desk while my work table is buried under all the stuff that needs to be in the flat files that will not be operational until after Turkey Day. Really, I’m getting nothing done, well, nothing larger than like four square inches. Oh well, I should know by now, having written and drawn four books on whatever rickety table presented itself, that things like fancy desks aren’t part of my process. Sure, they look cool but really, when I stop and think about it, the money spent to acquire a cool desk would allow me to make so many books that there’s no reason to entertain the notion of owning one. I just have to remember to keep everything simple. By definition, a fancy desk is not simple.

Here’s my life. (please note that Darth Vader is in each shot to provide a sense of scale)

The Augmented Camp Hill Desk:

The Work Table:

Huge Flat Files… Er, Almost:

Big Tuesday

2011-11-08T21:30:00.003-05:00

Let’s see, I drove to Kingston… near Queenston… near Princeton (Mandy wondered if there is a Princesston but I don’t think there is) to meet with the Powers That Be concerning the Salem Witch book proposal and back to the JC before my normal lunchtime. I am pooped. Five months of research and doodling, seven weeks of “intense work” and one week of “super-death work” came to a head. Yesterday, I was sitting at my desk drawing like crazy person, today, the whole project is out of my hands. Gone. Poof.

And now, we wait.

But, if you’ve learned anything about me via this blog, it’s that down time is bad for my soul.

So… what do I draw tomorrow? I made a list of all the projects I’d like to get done in say… the next year. Then I made a list of projects which actually have deadlines. I had to take into account that we’re in the Thanksmas Eve season, therefore quality time for work is hard to come by. With an illustrated novel to promote, perhaps a picture book to draw and my sundry blogging/web comic-ing to do, the best course of action for the near future is to crank out some random stuff for the 2012 MoCCA Fest. Not that I envision selling a lot of stuff at MoCCA Fest, but I want to make a respectable showing. If you find yourself in NYC on Saturday, April 28th and Sunday, April 29th, you could own a Timothy Decker original. Cheap. I mean, really cheap. So come on down, stop by the table, make a new friend, walk out with a wonderful piece of original art and a story you can tell the grandkids about. They’d love to know you met me and hear the tale about that weird, esoteric drawing above the mantle.

That’s pretty much it. I barely slept, I barely left my desk. I inked until I could ink no more. For example, when I can listen to two seasons of The Vampire Diaries, all 32 hours, in just under two days, I know that I’m inching toward creative madness.

Off to sleep. (Yes, I’ll actually sleep tonight [which all my dear, old friends will tell you is a lie and that I never, ever actually sleep] but I’ll give it a shot. Of course, tomorrow night, that’s a different story. I’m already jonesing for some 2 AM drawing. Plus, I have to catch up on The Vampire Diaries season 3…)

The Clock is Ticking… Much, Much Faster Than Expected...

2011-11-01T20:22:00.002-04:00

Ok. Tuesday… Time to post. The big news, since last week, is that I am meeting with the publisher to talk about this Salem Witch book thing on the 8th and not the 10th. Over the course of a few emails, I lost 24 to 28 hours of working time (given that I do work 12 to 14 hours when I really get going). That comfortable cushion that I’d been working with vanished and now I have to be “on” pretty much all day, every day.

Of course, I rather like this pressure. I like deadlines, though I prefer to hit my faux deadline which I set a few days before the actual deadline… Anyway, the pressure of having to show somebody, anybody, the work I’ve done makes me crank up my game. I truly miss it during the long months when a project only lives on my desk and in my imagination. It never seems quite real until there’s an editor or designer to talk with about stuff.

It does stress me out. Sleep is sort of a thing of the past. Or sleeping well. Sleeping well is boring. Who wants to be boring? You know who, Tobias. For all ya’ll hoping to see a Tobias picture book, it’s not going to happen for awhile. My world is all about witches. Tobias’s world is all about puffing out his grills and all but growling at me every time I bump the desk (like the great white shark at the end of Jaws 4… really? A growling shark? Like there’s anything between those teeth and gullet to produce a growling sound?). That said, Jamie's so going to have to draw a Tobias book because I don't do color. Tobias is a rather brilliant, little fish.

And there you have it. Off to get my draw on while eating dinner. Then I’ll draw while sleeping. Draw while brushing my teeth. Draw while making Mandy’s lunch…

Meet Tobias.

2011-10-25T17:09:00.004-04:00

Dummy booking it up. That’s life these days. It’s the first time since I finished the punk book illustrations that I feel my creative muscles flexing at their optimum level. There’s just something about stringing several ten hour days together that makes me feel like I’m actually doing what I should be. I know it’s not my usual pen and ink stuff, not yet, but it’s still “work” and seeing page after page of sketches turn into a book gives me confidence. And given the state of the publishing world, I’ll take all the confidence that I can get.

I’m going through pens and markers like they were Pixy Stix. I’m half regretting my decision to work at a finished image size and on 100% cotton paper (the stuff just soaks up the ink), but I keep thinking that this is all about putting my best foot forward. If everything goes well, I can use these dummy sketches as a rough layout guide for the actual illustrations as they are proportionately the same as the book I wish to make. That’s something I learned from my stab at the Easter Island/Rapa Nui picture book/dummy book, my failed project of last summer. My illustrations were huge and yet my dummy book was relatively small. The choice of scale was all about speed. I wanted to make the dummy book quickly and get it out the door because I was so convinced that I’d made the coolest book. In the end, my hast led me nowhere. And I didn’t even have rough sketches that would translate, quickly and easily, into the full sized illustrations. It was a short cut that didn’t pay off and I’m not about to make the same mistake twice. Regardless of what happens with this Salem book, whether it goes the first publisher to look at it or if we have to shop it around for who knows how long, as soon as it has a home, I will be ready to illustrate it. No wasted time, no wasted effort. If the quality of my work is to improve, I must scrutinize every step of my working method and push myself harder with each project, then see where things can go. To worry about what an editor might think about this page or that idea or how I made my dummy book is silly. I haven’t made enough money in this business to worry about much of anything. I’m going to do what I do and look for people who like what I produce and want to make it better.

And then, hopefully, you guys will enjoy it.

Part of my current crazy, which is the best way to describe sitting at my desk from sun up to sun down, is my new friend, critic and confidant, Tobias. Well, he’s not really new, he’s been living on my desk for a few months, but he’s new to the book making process.

I rescued him from our aquarium. Mandy keeps trying to introduce betas (one a time, mind you, and not all at once because that would turn into a bit of a brouhaha with bloody fins flying everywhere ) to the rest of our fishy world. Since we have friendly fish, everyone gets along fine… the trouble comes from the current in the tank, which has proven to be too great for the betas who have spent the better part of their existence sitting in tiny, stagnant bowls at the pet store. Sure, male betas are all kinds of aggressive when they’re going to throw down with another male in a fight to the death in the hope of macking on a lady beta, but otherwise, they’re the 90 lb weakling of the aquarium world. So, rather than let Tobias die of a massive coronary while battling the Gulf Stream in our 30 gallon tank, I put him in a decent-sized bowl on my desk.

It’s so much nicer talking to a fish than talking to myself. Instead of saying “I’m such an idiot!” when I mess up, which prompts me to look around and wonder about the state of sanity; I can say “Tobias, I’m such an idiot!” and he jumps, Tobias is easily startled, then swims in little circles until such time as he decides I’m not likely to bother him again, and in those seconds, I realize that I’m not an idiot and that I’m not losing my tenuous grip on reality. I’m just a guy at desk making teeny marks with ink on paper who occasionally makes a mistake just like everyone else. Over the last few months, Tobias and I established a connection. Plus, he’s much less angry than I am, which is kind of funny because he’s the sort of fish who is supposed to get all pissed and puff out his gills and Grrr up his bowl, while I’m the kind of artist who makes it his “thing” to define the often hidden nobility of humanity. Obviously, I have some things to learn from peaceful Tobias.

Same day, different deadline.

2011-10-18T12:37:00.003-04:00

I’m still single-tasking. Which, it turns out, is a good thing because I have a deadline that is a bit more concrete than the last one. Now, I have until November 10th to get my ducks in a row. Or witches, since they weigh the same as ducks and are, therefore, made of wood… something, something, “build a bridge out of her!” But anyway, I have a few weeks to wrap up this Salem dummy book and put the final touches on the handful of finished illustrations. All completely doable. I must say, it’s starting to look like a ‘real’ book. I guess I’ve turned that corner from where it’s just a pile of musings and to where it congeals into a story that will make sense to someone who isn’t me. And, despite my best efforts, it is very Decker-esque. It seems that I have a style. Here’s to hoping it evolves over time… if nothing else, my pen and ink work is improving book by book. That’s got to count for something.

The last week was all about putting some contrast on the wispy drawings of the dummy book. I think I mentioned that my sketches are very sketchy indeed and there are times when a few tiny lines tell enough of a story for my mind to recognize what I intend to do when it comes time to ink. But I know that my sketches don’t always translate in the minds of others, so I bought some crappy pens and big, black markers and started to clarify my rough images. It’s not as time consuming as making an actual pen and ink drawing, but it does seem to take a decent number of hours. Of course, I could be putting too much effort into it, I have very limited success with dummy books. But I know that my ideas can get a little “high concept” for the picture book world and I intend to do whatever is necessary to put my best foot forward. I think that’s part of a good collaboration, which this most definitely is, that feeling of trying to bring a little more than your best to the table. Landing a contract isn’t easy and I’m going to do everything in my power, short of illustrating the whole book, to increase our chances.

Other than that, little is going on. I’m still at war with the book lice but I’m finally winning. Between the freezing, microwaving and double pesticide bombings, I’ve gained the upper hand. I actually have some art supplies and books that are completely free of the little buggers. I don’t have time to go all total war on them, but if any still exist when after the 10th of November, they will rue the day. Rue it! I will admit, I’ve learned a lesson from this plague of teeny, harmless bugs; I need even less stuff than I ever thought possible. To my mind, there’s something quite nice about having a single book sitting there to read and a single project on my desk… and nothing else in sight. What can I say, I’m easily distracted. Well, not really, but I get faux distracted all the time. But to find myself with just a few sheets of paper, my pen & ink and countless hours at my disposal… it’s kind of humbling because, quite simply, that’s all it takes to find my happy place. It makes it much easier to ignore commercials for iPads, Lexususus and prescription medications.

The clock is ticking. Off to work.

Hm… gotta find something to write about…

2011-10-11T11:46:00.004-04:00

So, Edward Gorey has come up in conversation a lot in the last few months. And a few times over the past seven years. It’s all part of doing pen and ink work, weird pen and ink work at that. Everyone has to talk about him at one point or another.

It may seem odd, given my choice of media, to admit that I discovered Gorey rather late in my artistic development. Beyond that PBS Mystery opening credit thing that I saw as a kid, I didn’t really look at any of his work, in or out of context, until I was twenty-five and the only reason I took an interest in his illustrations was because the cute girl I wanted to ask out was into his work. I think that at least 93.2% of my decisions are based upon what cute girls think I should do. A cute girl got me to move to New Jersey and a cute girl told me that I'd be great at writing children's books. Likewise, in 9th grade, Lisa Harling told me that I looked better with my glasses on, so I stopped being that weird kid who only put his glasses on to read the chalk board (yes, we still had chalk boards in the early 1990’s) only to hide them while walking the halls. She also got me ride my first rollercoaster. I’m sort of certain that if I bumped into her on the street tomorrow and she suggested that I take my skilz to Thunderdome and battle it out with some armor wearing behemoth, I’d start wrapping my knuckles in rope, dip them in honey and shards of broken glass and shadow-box my way to Bartertown. Ah, Lisa Harling. Where was I? Oh yeah, Edward Gorey. So I read all of his stuff. And as much as I loved his illustrations, I found that his text left a bad taste in my mouth. Obviously the guy was brilliant, I wouldn’t say otherwise, but I couldn’t get into his macabre love of violence, even if it was merely ironic or darkly humored. I know that sounds weird given the rather dark settings I choose for my work, but the difference is that for me, violence is a sad but accurate facet of history, whereas, Gorey uses it for entertainment. I’m always leery of violence as entertainment and his writing style didn’t fit my personality: with the notable exception of The Ghastlycrumb Tinies, which is brilliant but being an ABC book at heart, isn’t quite as Gorey-esque as the rest of his oeuvre. I think that’s why it’s his most commercially successful title.

At any rate, things didn’t work out with the girl (not Lisa Harling but the other girl, though things didn’t work out with Lisa either) and I put Gorey into that part of my brain full of random art nonsense. Three years later, I was working on my first book. I chose pen and ink because it was cheap and reproduced well. I chose black and white because I thought I’d have to print it myself and, being poor, kept it simple. I never really thought about Gorey or his work. I stole liberally from Andrew Wyeth and 14th century Japanese painting, well, Andrew Wyeth stole from the Japanese long before I was born, but whatever.

As the years passed, I’ve run into countless people who ask me how much of an influence Edward Gorey is to my work and I always feel kind of bad to say not very much. But I have learned something from him over the last seven years, something that only came from working exclusively in monochromatic pen and ink and it’s something that’s been at the forefront of my mind the last few months: work small, work fast. That may not sound like much, but it’s a simple philosophy that opens up all sorts of creative opportunities for the detail oriented, faux OCD, pen and ink artist. Working small is a tough one. I’ve made some pretty big pen and ink drawings and they were pretty kick-ass but they took forever to finish. And that’s where the work fast part comes in. If you work small, you can cram as much or as little detail into a piece as you want and still get it done in a few hours or few days. The idea being, that if you get a whole lot of small, quickly rendered illustrations done in a short period of time, you’ve produced something that can go somewhere, be it to a publisher or online or etc. If the goal is to get your work “out there,” then it pays to get it done and out there. Or, by working small and fast, you can do a lot of work on a project and see if it all functions the way it needs to. If it does, then it won’t take long to finish it and send it off into the world. If it doesn’t, then it’s not hard to start over and get things right. Like I said, it’s pretty simple stuff, however, it’s phenomenally useful in taking a project from an idea to completion. It’s just another part of the ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’ philosophy that allows me to make deceptively complex books with extremely difficult subjects. So, I guess I owe Edward Gorey some props for teaching me that one… from beyond the grave… ooooo! Ooooo!

Witches Reprieved. Go figure.

2011-10-04T17:31:00.003-04:00

Finally, it’s autumn. My bony fingers are corpse-y chilled as all get out and I think I caught a cold. This is awesome. This is my time of year.

So the Salem book is still on. I’ve talked to all the book people and they are in agreement, that we should finish our take on the witch trials. Of course, we still need to get a publisher to fall in love with it… My goal this week is to pretty-up the dummy book with pens and markers. That's code for lots of Netflix and music. When I finish it, my brain will be less melty.

Single-tasking. That’s my new thing. I think, in a matter of a few years, it will be all the rage on resumes across this wonderful country. Or at least on the East and West Coasts… at this point, I’m pretty much willing to let those middle states to figure out stuff on their own. Single-tasking is the opposite of multitasking and, apparently, it’s the only way I get things done. …you’d think I would have solved all these ‘working method’ things before nearly turning thirty-seven… As part of my 'new get things done' approach to getting things done, I’m all about the single-tasking. Basically, I focus on one project a day. And that chosen project is the only project that I take to my desk. Everything else stays in another room, far from my easily distracted mind. Yeah, I’m still running with my “keep it simple, stupid” mantra.

And the weekly update:

I finished copy-editing the punk book. It wasn’t half as frightening or impossible as I first thought it was going to be, which was a blessing. In the end, it was painless. I think this means that we’re 99.99% done with whole book. So… 2012 can’t get here fast enough…

…Except I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my mystery web graphic novel project. I gave it another rewrite to better fit my new design. The more I look at it, the more I wonder what to do with it. Do I try and get it published as a book or do I try and post it as a serial story… or both? Here's what I'm going to do in the near future, let all my thoughts ferment for a few weeks as I finish the dummy for the Salem book, then see what feels like the best move. Though, to be honest, every time I find myself blogging or updating my web comic, I get the feeling that the internet is the best way to get my story out there. I like the idea that you will be reading it nearly as soon as I finish it rather than having to wait a year or so as would happen with the normal publishing model. What can I say, I like when people read my stuff.

And it turns out that seven days in the freezer does seem to kill book lice. Slowly, but surely, I’m getting my drawings and art supplies back in working order. Unfortunately, since we use our freezer for storing food, I can only freeze so many cubic inches of stuff each week, so I have no idea when this torment will come to an end. Plus, we have yet to solve the issue of killing the book lice in the various rooms where they occur because they are tough little buggers. I’m still annoyed but at least I feel like I can find a way out of this situation even if it’s going to take all winter.

The witches get hanged... maybe.

2011-09-27T12:11:00.003-04:00

Turmoil! Of sorts… or maybe not. Here’s the deal, after a weekend in PA, during which I received the green light from Jamison concerning the dummy book for our Salem Witch project, another new book about the same subject landed a pretty decent award for illustration. Which blows for us.

Of course, you have to assume that someone out there is working on the same subject that you are. There are no new ideas, just new ways of telling the same story over and over again. I realize that and I work very hard to come up with novel ways of doing things. The year that my WWI book came out, there was another book about a letter and WWI. It was cute and charming and warm and unlike my book in every way despite having the same basic premise. The difference between that situation and the current one is that when those WWI books were released, they came out at the same time and nobody really paid any attention to either of them. So, basically, neither book won the lottery that year.

This new situation is slightly different. For one, our book doesn’t exist yet. Second, theirs is out and getting a lot of press. That’s two strikes against us, even though our book is completely different and much cooler. The award is just annoying in that libraries and schools tend to buy books that receive awards. So that book will end up on shelves. And how many Salem Witch books does a particular institution need? Odds are, none, but if they go for any, they’ll buy the one that has the shiny sticker saying it won Such-and-Such in 2011.

Which brings us to turmoil. Does it make sense to push on, invest the time and energy, to bring our book into being and convince a publisher to back it when the chance for it to do well in the market is less favorable? Is it better to put that time and effort into another book? I know I always talk about being a starving artist (and really, I literally haven’t made a dime from books since 2009) and how that allows me to do whatever I want regardless of what The Market says to do, but it’s hard enough to create a quirky/cool book knowing that it probably will not do well… the thought of working on a quirky/cool book that is even more handicapped than my obviously unmarketable books seems like a bad idea.

Any thoughts? I’m open to suggestions. I even sent emails to my book people asking advice because we are at that point where it’s fish or cut bait. Such are the vagaries of the publishing world.

I guess I’ll go finish copy-editing the punk book.

Did I mention the book lice? That’s my other issue and has been going on for awhile now. Basically, Mandy’s indoor garden, which didn’t work out at all, allowed some very annoying insects to infest all of our books and all of my paper. Otherwise known as 99% of everything I own and hold dear. It’s wonderfully frustrating and I doubt that Job was half as annoyed as I am these days. And nothing we try seems to kill the little buggers. Right now, I’m freezing piles of old drawings, supposedly stuffing things in the freezer for seven days kills the entire life cycle of the critters, but I have my doubts (I was microwaving stuff for awhile which seemed to work until things started catching on fire...). And then I get to take apart my wonderful shelves, sand them and paint them… something I so don’t have time to do. Then we get to pesticide bomb every room of our apartment. And then there are the books. With the exception of books that we bought since June, everything needs to be cleaned. Then decontaminated. We’re still trying to figure out how to do that. Right now, we have three options: use a dehumidifier and try and get each room maintain a near 0% humidity for like a week or two… get a plastic bin, pile it with books and then add a layer of dry ice and let it melt… or just wait until winter arrives, with its dry air and freezing temperatures, remove the heat form one room at a time so that they become, in essence, freezers and kill the bugs. I’m less that hopeful at present but what are you going to do…

Did I mention that I keep having to go to the dentist? Good times, good times.

Anyway, I’m not about to let any such little annoyances slow me down, so I’m off to work.

Another Tuesday... more than half over.

2011-09-20T17:11:00.004-04:00

If you ever find yourself sitting at my desk and you look up, say to watch my beta fish, you will see my motivational momento mori. When I need to focus, I just have to remember to keep drawing and that a shark will eat me… someday. There’s no time to lose. What can I say, there’s something to be said for keeping everything simple.

Another gray day in the JC. It looks like autumn arrived a few days early, which makes me extremely happy. The worse the weather, or maybe the more dramatic the weather, the more energized I am. Long, lazy days of sunlight and heat just bore the crap out of me.

So here’s where things stand:

I’m still editing the punk book, but that should be wrapped up in the next week or so.

And then there’s the witch book. I suddenly find myself until the middle of October to prepare my dummy book and finished drawings. Extra time is usually a good thing, but right now, it’s slightly annoying. Of course, it’s only annoying to me and only annoying because I have too much time to think about what I’m doing. Extra time usually leads to second guessing. I keep looking at what I’m doing and wondering if I’m on the right track. Very annoying. Especially, since I’m definitely designing the book I want to make. But oh well, such is life. I’ll keep blundering on, starting and restarting until I run out of time and have to show somebody something.

Right now, looking at the witch book, I sort of have that feeling that I should just start drawing it. It’s a ridiculous notion, as this is a team project and that I only have two or three weeks to pull together a functional proposal, whereas a completed book would take months of effort. But that’s what I’m thinking.

Anyway, I’m off to work on the dummy book in the hope that I can show version 3.0 to Mr. Odone this weekend. Aw man, the stupid sun is coming out.

I saw The Dodos and The Luyas in concert...

2011-09-13T16:16:00.005-04:00

... 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.

Genius at work… Well, the Genius is ironing… the other guy is making a book.

2011-09-06T14:52:00.007-04:00

Because I’m a bitter shut-in, I can only hope that everyone else labored over the Labor Day weekend. That was my working title for this posting but it seemed far too nasty to use, though I did labor on my projects while other people barbequed or jet skied or misread their calendars and planted trees for Arbor Day. I sort of hope that someone out there did that last one, it would be cool if we planted trees for more holidays. It’s very annoying to be part of an increasingly short-sighted culture. But whatever.

All right, progress. With my September 22nd deadline fast approaching, I’ve kicked things into high gear.

Everything feels sort of weird because I didn’t write this Salem Witch text, that means I didn’t spend a whole bunch of years reading and researching the topic. At this point, I’ve spent two months focusing on the time period and its details. So, instead of feeling like a marathon, where I hear the starting gun and push myself for mile after mile until I finish a book, this project feels like a 4 x 100 meter relay and I’m running the last leg. Sure, the starting gun still goes off and people start running… but not me. Jamie did his part of the race, setting a good time what with his well written, well researched text and then handed it off to me and now I have to sprint my butt off to get this thing done. I’m not complaining, just explaining how weird things feel. It’s almost like cheating. Like, really, I get to take this cool topic and this cool text and draw whatever I want to make the book work? All right, but it’s going to be one peculiar book, just saying.

With that in mind, here’s where I am:

This is the layout. Classy, I know. Nothing like a bunch of 4x6 cards and a whole lot of tape to make you feel like you’re on the path to literary greatness. But that’s just how it goes. Lots of terrible sketches, pages of notes and stuff that is so silly or cliché or illegible that it ends up in the trash. And out of all that messy madness, 40 odd pages of well rendered illustrations.

Now, here’s a quirk of my “process” (not that I ever think or refer to it as such because it makes me sound really really lame… maybe I should just say “this is what I do”?). This is what I do:

I have this thing about making notes. I like notes. I think it has to do with the fact that sketches don’t convey everything I feel I need to know or keep in mind about a given image or scene. Illustrations rarely seem to convey things such as how something smells, sounds, tastes… you following me here, as well as words do. And it’s those other facts, those non-visual aspects of a given moment, that carry so much useful information. So, when I make my layout designs, they almost never have any visual elements beyond simple shapes and things like arrows or scribbles. I have bigger fish to fry with my design than just how it’s going to look. I want emotional content and details beyond the purely visual to take center stage. Pretty drawings are not good enough to carry their half of a good picture book. They need subtext, gobs of it.

Of course, this gets me into trouble. For one, it’s very hard for me to show even half finished ideas to anyone, like editors of children’s literature, simply because there usually isn’t enough on the page to make any sense. If I’ve learned anything in my years of working at this book thing, it’s that I’m wary of doing the normal thing and creating dummy books to pitch an idea, then land a contract, then finish the real book. My work doesn’t translate well in a half finished form. So, I’m sort of walking on egg shells these days. It’s certainly a factor for my loyalty to the creative people behind my books, because, quite seriously, they are the only professionals who look at what I’ve done and what I intend to do and then, perhaps because they like being on the lunatic fringe of publishing, give me the green light to do my thing. It turns out that kind of situation is rare. I’ve met lots of people who are excited about my work and want to work on projects, but not many who can explain to their marketing departments that I’m not just a little bit insane. A picture book about the Black Death…? For kids…?

And it makes it hard for me to talk shop with other illustrators. In reality, I think I’m a writer who can illustrate. Most illustrators are not. They are visual people. We don't have much in common. Consequentially, they walk around with their stack o’ moleskins and pocket full of pens and pencils, making furious sketches of anything that crosses their path or images that will, one day, grace the pages of their next book. Meanwhile, I walk around, hands in pockets, taking in everything with the hope that I will forget 99% of it and maybe, just maybe, distil something I’ve learned about the world into one of my illustrations. If you ever see me working with my sketchbook, I usually only own one at any given time because I use them so rarely, then it means that I’m bored to death and am escaping the world rather than engage it. You can see where this would cause me to have trouble finding a lot of common ground with illustrators. Art supplies, Photoshop and compositional problems don't interest me very much. I'd rather talk about music.

I sort of don’t connect with writers either… but we’ll save that for another post.

And there’s where things stand. Lots of work to do, lots of time to do it, so long as I stay focused. At least it’s cold and rainy, I work much better when it’s miserable outside. I like miserable weather.

And what do we burn apart from witches?

2011-08-30T11:46:00.002-04:00

And I’m back to work. My trip to PA, to revel at the 2nd Annual CBG Festival, lasted a bit longer than anticipated because of Irene’s ability to mess up Amtrak’s world… and apparently very little else above the Mason-Dixson Line.

But now I can regain my focus with gusto because, aside from a week in September during which several friends plan to invade my apartment, there is nothing on my calendar that will take me away from my work. I have four weeks… er, three-ish, to make Salem, circa 1692, my home. I’ve been waiting for this week to start since the beginning of July. This is the first time all summer that I have days full of nothing, a boundless horizon of time, which is exactly what I need in order to bring my A game to the witch book. This morning, it was like putting my feet in the blocks and hearing the pistol fire. The race is on.

So, the first order of business, finish the 1:1 scale rough dummy book of the entire witch story. This is still a new phase for me though it’s considered “how you do it” in the publishing industry. (I’m used to just making my book my way and showing it off because I tend to make weird books that don’t necessarily translate in an unfinished form… but this time, my deadline precludes such nonsense.) Basically, you draw a rough version of what the entire book is going to look like, with rough approximations of what and where the text will be, so that an editor can read the book and have some idea of how the whole thing is going to work. It’s not really a time consuming project as far as drawing goes simply because you don’t need the best drawings. It’s all about composition and pacing. Now, composition and pacing are my two favorite parts of writing and illustrating picture books. I love taking the weird movie in my head and spinning it across 40 pages, editing it here and there, turning it inside out if need be, to make the story work. There’s a certain magic that comes from combining day dreams and doodles into a story that affects the reader in exactly the manner that I (and in this case Jamie as well) want. The physical act of drawing is easy, creating a coherent thought via drawing is hard. That said, it’s going to take a couple of days to finish the dummy book which I will then scan so that we can turn into a PDF for the viewing pleasure of editors.

Then I get to make a handful of “finished” pen and ink pages. They will represent the look that I intend to bring to the entire book, you know, once it’s under contract and such. Of course, I can’t really call them finished pages because if we land a contract, some egghead will have to go over the text with a fine tooth comb (this is non-fiction, or sort of) and everything will be fluid for a little while, therefore, there’s a good chance that I’ll have to rework my ideas. Or, even more likely, I’ll end up hating my sample illustrations and just redraw them, like a thousand times better, when I get the green light to make the real, final drawings. But I’ll babble about all this when I start doing it.

Other than that, there’s not much to say.

I stole an old computer chair from my parents’ basement which means that I finally have comfortable seating to go along with my new desk and art shelves. It’s almost like I’m a professional or something. And, as per usual, the old chair taps into those deep and traumatically dramatic/romantic days of my foolish youth that carried me from Pennsylvania to California to Texas back to Pennsylvania to Maryland and into the 1992 Saturn that I crashed on a snowy road, to avoid a much worse accident, which was the catalyst for me becoming a children’s book author in the first place. I like things that come with ghosts. I may not own much, and I really don’t, but nearly everything I own is freakishly haunted.

Slowly getting up to speed... yeah, that sounds good.

2011-08-23T09:47:00.004-04:00

Hopefully, like a tremendous freight train, I’ll have such momentum that I’ll utterly destroy this Salem Witch book. You know, in a good way. I’m still at the gentle, clicky-clack sort of train ride, the kind that lulls you with a heartbeat-like rhythm and just a hint of swaying from side to side. But it’s still momentum. After battling through the last few years where momentum was a rare commodity, I’m nearly ecstatic to feel an undeniable pull toward completing another picture book. Truth be told, I’d been a bit worried that I’d burned-out and it was time to find a grown up job and turn my desk into a stand for a big ol’ flat screen TV. I’m much relieved that isn’t the case.

Yesterday, I read an article on dealing with adult ADHD. I don’t have ADHD, but sometimes I wish I did because it would explain and or excuse my lack of focus, which in my case is really due to laziness. I mean, who wants to admit to being lazy? Anyway, I’ve found that reading about conditions which share the same symptoms as laziness, like ADHD, sometimes sheds a little light on how to work through my more lazy behavior. In this latest article, which was fairly poor I have to say, there was a list of ten tips a person with ADHD could do in order to improve their ability to focus and accomplish goals. It turns out that I already do five of the helpful tips to stay on track, unfortunately, the other five tips didn’t apply to my very specific career. The funny thing was that one of my productive behaviors made the list and yet I’d never previously thought of it as a way to combat those times when my focus is less than stellar.

Apparently, researchers call it “chunking” which I find rather inelegant even if it is a straightforward description of the behavior. Basically, a person who wishes to “chunk” learns to reduce a large project into manageable pieces. I’m sure that all of you out there with neither ADHD or faux ADHD find something like chunking makes perfect sense and you do it all the time. But to someone like me, who can get caught up in the minutia of just about anything simply because everything is far more exciting than cross hatching for hour after hour, being extremely conscious of my ability to manage huge projects is a distinct advantage.

My latest example of chunking on the Salem Witch book was the preparation of the paper for the “final” drawings. As I sit at my desk on any given day, my thinking bounces around various parts of the book, almost at random: what will the drawings look like, what do I need to put on the cover, how does this bit of text relates to that image, wow look how poorly I drew that particular figure and how am I going to redraw it…? The old adage that an orderly desk reflects an orderly mind has nothing to do with me. Fortunately, I’ve learned, and don’t ask me when or how, that if I take one part of the book making process and work it from start to finish, I get a great deal accomplished regardless of my flighty thinking. And that’s how I prepared the paper for the witch drawings. While my mind took its usual roller-coaster ride through my imaginary version of late 17^th century New England, I sat and quietly/diligently placed crop marks, center lines, page numbers and notes on sheet after sheet of paper. It took hours. Boring hours in which blank paper became slightly less blank and yet profoundly more useful in regard to the project at hand. It was the sort of tedious, repetitive action that keeps most people from finishing their grand book ideas. Grand book ideas… well, even shallow, stupid book ideas are complicated and multifaceted. There are times when it’s only through this nearly subconscious behavior of chunking, this ability to take a small bit of the larger whole and simply pound it into dust, that I really get anywhere with my work.

My earliest example of “chunking” comes from when I took standardized tests in junior and senior high. Remember having to fill out those multiple choice answer sheets with seemingly endless columns of A, B, C, D or E? Oh what torment. Anyway, while trying my best to answer the questions in the allotted time, what I was really doing while taking those tests was making a game of it via chunking. I sort of made it like a horse race. Each column was a “lap” if you will and I focused on which letter “won” a given “lap” (the winner being the letter at the bottom of column). I’d also keep stats on the number of A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s and E’s in each column, almost like a bookie, so that I could attempt to predict which letter would win the next lap. At the end of the test, the winner of the whole race was the letter that won the most number of laps. What can I say, I was extremely bored and breaking those useless hours into a multi-staged race of letters helped me stay sane.

Man, I hated when A or B won the race. Don’t ask me why, I just did.

What? You didn’t do that with your answer sheets? Come on, I can’t be the only one?

I drew pictures in the blank spaces of my SAT booklet too. Somebody out there did that as well, the SATs were awesomely boring.

And... I'm back.

2011-08-18T14:08:00.003-04:00

Sorry to leave you hanging, I had a bit of a vacation to get through before I could saddle up to my desk and get back to work.

I missed drawing. There wasn’t really any time, not even little bits of it, to string together into a focused hour. The days passed in a haze of half thoughts and mindless doodle, all of which are now in the trash can. I usually throw away most of the ideas, scribbling and sketches that come from such outings. Obviously, I’m not at my best when I am in “entertain”, “placate” or just “ignore” mode. The past five days were even less productive than usual.

So…

How are you? How is the end of summer going?

Around here, I nearly smell the coming of autumn. All that blistering heat of July is a distant memory and the sunlight on the bricks outside my window hits a mellow gold far earlier than it did a few weeks ago. Personally, I like working in autumn and winter more than spring and summer. Perhaps it’s just that my inner hermit that likes a quieter world.

But really, on a professional level, you missed little. I purged and rearranged my shelves so they are completely organized for the purpose of drawing, with both pencil and pen & ink, and the creation of books. All my dreams of making some other form of Art have been banished and all the distracting materials for their production went with them. The wall I’ve built in my psyche concerning this topic could keep the Mogul horde at bay.

For the next few weeks, I’m all about drawing, designing and inking 17^th century witches and those fun loving folks known oh so well to history as the Puritans. Could there be a darker and more dour cult in American history? Suddenly, all those diseased and malnourished peasants and serfs that I conjured for the plague book seem like the most gleeful and beautiful people who ever lived-ish. I guess my disinterest in color will really pay off on this project. At least I get to draw the beautiful, untouched landscape of coastal New England. The Puritans were petrified by the Wilderness, which isn’t surprising for a people with almost no aesthetic philosophy and a general fear of everything under the sun. “Aa! Trees! Blue skies! Furry animals! The Devil!” Hahahahaha. (The author wipes a laughter tear from the corner of his eye.) Anyway, it’s a bonus for me; natural beauty to counterbalance all the human ugliness that is the story of early Salem.

Off to draw some wooded glades. You stay out, Edward Cullen.

Happy Birthday, HBT!

2011-08-10T18:42:00.004-04:00

Yeah, so I lost a day. It is Wednesday, right? I’ll take this moment to wish Tom a happy 25^th… I think he’s 25.

Anyway, Tom is in the process of writing his third major play. It’s comedy that he’s tinkered with for the last year or so. One night, like a week ago, he walked into my bedroom/studio and said, “You have to make me finish this play this month.” And I laughed. Not that he can’t finish the play this month, I have the utmost confidence that he can and that it will be a fine bit of theater, but that I could “make” him… You have to understand that all the little tricks, truths and lies that I tell myself in order to stay focused and motivated don’t work on him. And I have tried them all. Which isn’t surprising considering we all have to find our own working method and then stick to it with profound diligence. All I could say was that I couldn’t make him finish anything, but that I would be very excited to read the play when he was done writing it.

Now, that little anecdote brings me to discussing my work from this past weekend. I spent the weekend designing the layout for the Salem witch picture book and working on my mystery web project. The witch stuff went exceedingly well, I’ll talk about that later in this post. It’s the mystery project that I want to discuss right now because it’s all about getting things done.

I started to play with the idea for my mystery project two years ago. A few words, a quirky idea equaled the seed of a project. I puttered around with it from time to time, adding little bits and then setting it aside while I did my “real” work. Then, last summer, inspiration struck with the force of an atom bomb and I had a billion and a half ideas for what I could/would/should do with the mystery project. By the beginning of autumn, I’d written the text, which I thought was brilliant. I’d also designed a layout that I thought very attractive and interesting. And for the last year, I’ve slowly collected all the materials that I need to bring my mystery project into being and give to you via The Internet.

On Friday, I looked at everything I had for the project and realized that it wouldn’t work.

One of the things I learned while working on the punk book, which as you know went from being a standard graphic novel full of drawings to an illustrated novel with a handful of drawings, is that the more words I write, the less important my illustrations become. With the picture books, the opposite is true, the fewer words I have, the more important my illustrations become. It’s not rocket science, but I’d never really thought about my work that way, probably because I’d never written a novel before.

My mystery project had, by the end of the writing process, become a novella. I simply wrote a story that didn’t need as many large illustrations as my design call for. I could feel it in my bones, it would not work. I could sense that were I to try and illustrate the text with layout that had so inspired me last summer, that I would end up with a very boring story. As I’ve said many times before, if I get bored looking at my work, I know that my reader is going to be bored. I have to be excited, from start to finish, in order to make something worth reading.

By Saturday, I’d figured out what I needed to do. I created a new design that emphasized the text and included far smaller drawings that were more incidental than I’d previously imagined. And suddenly, the new layout worked and that gnawing feeling that I was about to toil on the most unreadable project ever melted away. Everything fell into place and I managed to sketch half of the preliminary illustrations in a single afternoon.

Of course, I showed Tom my progress. He asked me how I knew that my original design wouldn’t work and I didn’t have a good answer. “Feeling” that something isn’t going to work doesn’t clarify much. So, I thought about it for a day and came up with what I think is a good response, which I told Tom, not that he really believed me. I know when something isn’t going to work, even if it is a brilliantly inspired idea, when it stops me from actually completing a project. I find that most people don’t quite understand that the real key to being a writer or illustrator or ___ is the ability to work until something is “done”. Done means that you’re not going to tinker with it anymore, that you are going to set it out there for the world to see and that it will make sense. Then, you move on to the next project. Ideas are great, finished work is hella better.

As for the Salem witches, Jamie and I agreed on a tentative text, which meant I could plow ahead with all the layout nonsense that I so love to do. It’s sort of like making the rules to a game that you intend to win every time you play. Some people would find that boring, but really, it’s not that easy to invent rules and it’s harder still to stick to them and actually create a story that functions. I rather like limitations. I’m sure that’s obvious to anyone who has seen my work. I prefer limitations that I set for myself and bristle when other people try to saddle me with their limitations. That’s probably what made me dislike school as much as I did.

With the witch book, I’m playing inside the format of a 40 page picture book. Since this book has both a small foreword and afterword, I really only have 36 pages or so to spin the entire narrative that consists of 18 blocks of text. My page size, at present, is a whopping 8 x 11 inches, which doesn’t sound like much until you factor in that things like a two page spread has a surface area of 176 square inches and that I work with a pen point manufactured to produce a line 1 millimeter thick. 176 square inches is a vast emptiness of white paper. I’m sure I’ll complain about that in the future. But I like this part of my profession. I enjoy moving sketches and text around a given space until it works, which is what creative people call composition and what laymen refer to as sitting around with your headphones on to avoid doing the dishes.

quo vadimus...

2011-08-02T20:51:00.003-04:00

All right, another Tuesday… or the last glimpse of one. Not my most productive day. The previous five days, I kicked serious butt. Friday and Saturday were each one of those twelve hour days of drawing when I forget to eat and find myself lost in that blinding space without time or care. Of course, I sort of hate those days because I don’t feel like I’ve “lived” but that’s the price I pay for what I do and beats the crap out of spending twelve hours at a useless job that I don’t care about. So I’m not too surprised that today hasn’t been my best. It’s not the easiest task, maintaining my focus, and after a few rather intense days, I burn out. I don’t really like that fact, though I understand it.

Part of my focus issue has nothing to do with the recent hours I’ve spent working. I mean, the work has to get done, there are deadlines and people that I have no desire to disappoint because I like that they like what I do. Being accountable to them is a nice incentive that keeps me on track, however, my motivation to make books comes from my wonky brain. And lately, my wonky brain’s been all kinds of busy conjuring dreams of me as some sort of painter/illustrator/writer… cigar box guitar playing musical genius… well, not so much that last one. In case you were wondering, I’m not a painter. I probably have never been a painter and the future doesn’t look too promising. Like I said recent posts, I have a lot of silly, academic mannerisms which I need to shed as they run counter to my actual life and work.

And I was doing so well. Years ago, I purged all the materials of painting and got down to making books with the simplest medium I could possibly find. That was going well and continues to blossom to this day. And then friend handed me watercolor paints and the possibility of a joint project to create. As you may guess, that friend and that joint project vanished, leaving me with literally everything it would take to make me into a modern day watercolor painter guy. Everything, it seems, but that little bit of magical pixie dust that it takes to actually paint. I mean, I can’t even bring myself to bust out the paints to use in conjunction with my drawings. I spent the last year thinking about every facet of painting and yet I have nothing to show for it. That’s why I’ve been delving into my past, finding little hints and clues as to the how’s and why’s that got me to where I am, in the hope of figuring out where I’m going…

So, what do I know?

I just watched the evening light creep across my bedroom wall while thinking my way through this problem, digging through box after box of drawings the whole time. Now, for those of you who are not me, there is no problem or if there is, it’s easily solved: I have boxes of drawings, I don’t have a single painting, therefore, I’m a drawer (draftsman, draftsperson?). Tada! It’s that simple. And I can’t argue with that logic, the preponderance of evidence to support it is inconceivably overwhelming. That said, my brain still says that might not be the case. Obviously, my brain can be fairly stupid at times. Like now and the past year.

I want to be successful. I want to make cool, sophisticated literature for children and childish adults. I want to pursue this career with everything I have. Which means, I need to stop being stupid.

My latest find in the Decker Archive:

My dad hung onto this gem for a very long time, the original is long since lost, but he kept this photocopy in the desk of his office. He gave it to me when he retired. Apparently, when I was five, I wanted to re-arrange the furniture in my room. The best way to explain how to do that was to draw a picture of what I wanted the finished room to look like. I got a small piece of paper, a black ball point pen and drew. I don’t remember making the drawing but I do remember my room with that layout so I must have gotten the point across. (My aside, on the drawing, the object in the bottom left quadrant that looks like a square tethered above a circle was my first desk, a desperately desired object that fulfilled my xmas wishes when I was two years and two months old. I was a weird kid. In my defense, I did have older siblings, two of which became teachers, so desks and “homeworks” were common themes in our house.)

At any rate, every time I look into my past, I find that writing and drawing define each little epoch. It’s like finding fossils of indicator species in different layers of rock and figuring out how a particular landscape was formed. It doesn’t take a genius to speculate that writing and drawing are probably going to define my future as well.

Consequentially, I decided to take control of the situation. It may take time to change what I’m thinking, to clear my head and get everything running the way I want it, but it doesn’t take much effort to “remove” all the stuff from my studio that makes me think about painting. I didn’t throw anything away… though I thought about it, ‘cause you never know when someone might need a brush for some weird project and I can’t bring myself to toss rather expensive art supplies in the garbage when I know that I can find someone to use them. And then there’s the books. Art books, the worst of the worst. Yeah, for now, I’m done with those too. I took all the painting stuff and all my art books, walked to our library/storage room, and locked them in a trunk. Then I gave the key to Mandy and told her to hide it.

I know, it sounds excessive, but it's not. A fire, every now and again, is good and necessary for the health of a forest. I think the same thing applies to the human mind, or at least my human mind.

The Art of Saying No.

2011-07-26T23:26:00.003-04:00

Ah… my poor leviathan story… It seems as though it is to be crushed by all my front burner projects. There is no progress to mention. I do have a bit of a regression to discuss. Remember a few posts ago when I put those terribly light, pencil drawings for the 18x24 inch painting that I intended to make as a test, thus ushering color into my work and kicking the leviathan story into overdrive? Yeah, so I tried to watercolor that painting. It was a fail. It seems that even though I can draw anything I desire just by thinking about it, I don’t have a similar skill when it comes to painting.

Mandy’s thoughts about my failure were more pragmatic and I'll paraphrase them, it’s all about the learning curve and right now is probably not the time to begin my quest to be a watercolor-oriented illustrator. What she meant was that it took me seven years of constant work to get where I am (the obscure talent) with my pen & ink illustrations. Therefore, it’s no stretch of the imagination to assume that it would take me another seven years to reach this point of proficiency with watercolor. In the end, I don’t have seven years to waste. I need those years to become a complete master of pen & ink.

It’s funny, after spending hours painting and failing, growing more bummed by the minute, I sat down and inked up a drawing without effort. Sure, there are difficulties with every drawing, but the odds are in my favor that in the end I’ll pull it off. And since I don’t get paid to “almost” make illustrations, it makes sense for me to bring my A game every time…

Still… perhaps we’ll see an inky sea monster in the near future.

Meanwhile, like I said, my front burner projects are looming before me. And that brings me to saying no.

There are times when I can see that the only way I’m likely to complete a project is to say no to just about every question asked of me. I used to think that it was just me being selfish with my time. I thought I was being arrogant, that my time was worth more than any invitation (be it a dinner, going to a thing, hanging out with ___). That made me feel like crap because I’d thought I’d left my destructive and arrogant behavior in the past. But now I realize that saying no is part of my working method.

The world is a constant distraction. Some of those distractions are awesome, some are annoying, but they’re all loud and up in my grill, every single day. The world doesn’t like to be ignored. And if I can offer any advice to a would-be writer/artist, it would be learn how to ignore just about everything imaginable. That might be my greatest talent, merely shutting out the illusion that lives outside my head and expending all of my energy on the illusions which are bound within it.

It seems I’ve hit one of those points when I will have to say no to things. Which is hard, because it’s the height of summer, people are visiting all the time, there are opportunities for little vacations, concerts galore, etc. There’s a lot to do and none of it is hard to find. And none of it helps me sit down and make a book. Ok, that’s harsh because going to events (like plays and concerts) does spark my creativity. I get a lot of ideas wandering around or riding the trains. But that doesn’t put ink on the page.

To look at the layout for a book, call it 40 pages, and think that each of those pages will take 25 hours to draw (that’s 1000 hours) and that I might redraw say half of those (another 500 hours)… the numbers grow like crazy. And that doesn’t include time researching the world I’m to inhabit or the history I need to understand in order to put all the details I love into the illustrations. Then I have to carve chunks of time out of a life that includes sleeping, eating, doing laundry and interacting with the people who remind me to eat, sleep and do the laundry.

It doesn’t make me seem like the most outgoing guy. Which runs counter to my naturally outgoing guy persona. It’s a rough gig, but it’s the only way the work gets done.

I’m off to plan a summer of nothing. Or very little at best.

Reformatting the ol' analog computer in my skull.

2011-07-19T08:52:00.007-04:00

I finished the cover illustrations for the punk book. Imagine that. At this point, I’m 99.9% done with it. I will admit that the last few months were not my best. I did stay focused enough to complete the task at hand, but only by the skin of my teeth. Each time I sat down to work, my mind wandered farther afield than usual. Being a dreamer is one thing, being a lazy dreamer is quite another. Needless to say, I’m going to nip that behavior in the bud.

That means identifying my ‘issue’, which is the same issue that’s plagued me for years: Why do I feel so compelled to fight against the stuff that comes naturally? That’s where the reformatting of my thinking comes into play. See, when I started down this path into The Arts, I was an ignorant teenager, utterly clueless about most everything and only really interested in things that stunned my visual cortex. That naivety “coupled with a traditional education” meant that I developed into an artist who thought he’d paint something like the Sistine Chapel or have shows in enormous, spacious galleries filled with people talking about art like it mattered. Of course, that didn’t happen. No one is interested in making a new Sistine Chapel and my skilz, what with my natural and obsessive love of drawing, didn’t guide me into the world of high stakes, gallery art. By my mid-twenties, after ten years of drawing, painting, photographing, print making and everything else under the sun, I’d hit a creative brick wall. Basically, I wasn’t about to become the artist that fit the definition in my brain, the definition born of thousands of art history books, trips to museums and galleries or my academic training. It just wasn’t going to happen. And it wasn’t because there weren’t galleries out there or that I sucked or I lacked the time/space/materials or anything like that. It wasn’t going to happen because I was never meant to be that ‘kind’ of artist. Bear with me, this will all eventually make sense.

So… I sort of have this Zen thing in my brain. Essentially, it says that things that are meant to work out will and if there’s resistance, it is because I’m trying something that doesn’t quite fit with what I really need to do. Now, that doesn’t mean I avoid things which are difficult, it just means that I know when I’m being an idiot (for instance, this spring, I spent the better part of two months trying my hand at drumming… yeah, that was me being an idiot, especially when playing stringed instruments works for me. Therefore, learning how to pick a banjo is difficult but still in line with my Zen-like guitar interest and will eventually prove successful).

And then, things from my past creep out and show me that where I am now is where I was always meant to be…

Like this:

This would be an aptitude test from my freshman year of high school (it’s amazing what I unearth when I dig through my parents’ basement) and it’s pretty funny and illuminating.

First off, I have no idea how I did well with the math part because I hate practical math as much as I hate Nazis. I’m sure that was the last time any of my math scores fell into the land of 80% of anything. But then there are the two categories in which I excelled: abstract reasoning and spatial relationships. Hm… The obvious one is the spatial relationship score, I mean, is there an easier way to say “this kid could draw or paint or whatever if he sets his mind to it”? In ninth grade, I’d just started to take art seriously and I’m sure that had I been tested again, say like in twelfth grade, my spatial relationship score would have been through the roof.

Then there’s the abstract reasoning, which is simply defined as taking big, complicated ideas, full of nuance and tangents, and being able to make sense of them. This is a skill that young children and politicians tend to lack. And people who write sit-coms, they're sort of deficient in abstract reasoning and humor... but now I'm off on a tangent.

My scores for verbal reasoning and language usage (I prefer the fake word “usement” by the way) didn’t suck too bad either.

Mix abstract reasoning, spatial relationships, verbal reasoning and language usement together and you pretty much get the recipe for the version of me that writes and illustrates awesome children’s books. It explains the complex subjects I choose, all the research, the development of clear themes and narratives combined with the ability to bring it all together with drawings in a well composed, thoughtfully edited and perfectly paced story. In a very general way, all of that information was dot-matrix printed on a sheet of paper in 1989.

Now, the next bit of evidence (and like the aptitude test, I’d completely forgotten about this one until it was placed in my hands back in May):

During my freshman year of college, when I finally found myself in an environment that was completely geared toward the production of art (my high school art classes were woefully inadequate for what I got myself into and had I not been drawing and painting on my own initiative, college would have crushed me). I dove in head first and did absolutely everything. Except sculpture, which is the art equivalent of long division. Man, I hated sculpture. But anyway, in the midst of all that drawing, painting, blah blah blah, I somehow managed to make this book.

Yeah, one of my first, personally motivated projects was to write and illustrate a book. I mean, considering what I do with all of my time these days, it’s amazing that such a relic could fall through the cracks of my personal history.

Apparently, I got it into my head that I was going to take all the poetry (terrible poetry) that I was constantly writing (despite the fact that I wouldn’t even remotely consider myself a writer for seven more years) and compile it into a nice little book. Which is what I did. I put together the whole collection, which wasn’t that hard because it was everything I’d ever written, broke it into digestible chunks, illustrated the endpaper and chapter breaks with, wait for it… pen and ink, and brought into being 100 pages of 18/19 year-old angst. It’s really terrible stuff but it taps all those things at which I excel: thinking, reading, writing, drawing. Ok, those first two are still the subject of debate, but writing and drawing, those are my golden boys. Then I did the unthinkable, I gave the book to my friends to read. I can only hang my head in shame. But I was a pretty arrogant kid, so, it’s no surprise that I would do such a dumb thing. Rumor has it that my book caused a poor teenaged girl to wreck her car because she had it on her dashboard, took a turn too quickly, saw the book sliding toward an open window, dove to save it and dinged her automobile into “something”. It’s frightening to wonder just who saw this little volume. Ugh.

Anyway, it seems that I was supposed to be writing books.

Which brings me back to the reformatting. Here I sit, at thirty-six, banging my head against the same brink wall of creativity that crushed me years ago. I look at all these paints, I go to museums, I look at other people’s work and I think… maybe that’s what I should be doing. For instance, the publishing world likes color… And by thinking like that, I fail to click with that fifteen year-old kid taking that aptitude test or that nineteen year-old kid who made his own book of poetry or even that far smarter, twenty-seven year old kid who chucked everything that was a distraction and started making picture books. I could continue to bang my head against the brick wall of Art or I could just walk through the door labeled “This Way to Writing and Illustrating.” You know, the door I found a decade ago.

Somehow, I must have locked myself out. But it seems I have a key in my pocket and that key has always been there.

It's hot.

2011-07-12T14:27:00.007-04:00

There are many ways to measure progress and to do so gives perspective on how things are going. It’s always good to get a bit of perspective. In my career, I could look at book sales (I don’t because it’s depressing), I could tally the cash pie I’ve made off of books (again, I don’t because it makes me sad inside), I can look at how my skilz have developed (I don’t because old drawings make me cringe)… Here’s what I do, I think about the place, the literal space, where I work. I figure that if things are getting better, if I’m working harder, if I’m thinking clearer, then my work space should get better and allow me to be more productive, inventive and happy.

Here’s how it goes:

The WWI book (The Letter Home). I drew that in the family room of my parents’ house on the dinner table in the dead of winter. There’s nothing like having to move all your work every time you need to sit down to eat or anytime someone needs to use the table for this or that… Plus, and many of you know this little fact from personal experience, the family room got cold during the winter. The rest of the house was cozy, but the family room was the point farthest from the fireplace or the thermostat. Therefore, I drew the WWI book while wearing my winter hat, usually a scarf, my fingers cracking in the chill. No amount of hot tea could make it comfortable. (Perhaps it was that particular location which drove my fair weather friends from my life. You see, people always came the house to do fun things, but when I started drawing my first book, the amount of fun things that happened diminished greatly, so only the friends who understood what I was doing, hour after hour, continued to visit and sit in the chill of the family room.) But I got it done.

Skip ahead to the plague book (Run Far, Run Fast). I drew that book in our one room/faux studio, basement apartment in Jersey City during the height of an urban summer. For one, it was summer, so it was hot, and our place had bars over the two tiny windows, so there was no way to install an air conditioner, not that we could afford to buy or run an AC unit. Hot and humid are just as annoying as freezing. When it’s freezing, ink doesn’t flow the way it is supposed to. When it’s hot and humid, the paper curls and bends, soaks up all the sweat from your hands and falls apart like a paper towel when you hack into it with a steel pen point. Our place was small, really small, so the only table we had was this ice cream café table, a circular affair supported by thin metal legs that jiggled like springs when bumped. Consequently, I roasted in the heat, sweat pouring from my brow and did my best to draw the 150 odd images without tearing holes in the paper or touching the table for fear that it would tremble and smudge my lines. It was a long summer. I still think that book is compositionally my best work.

That got me to the massacre book (For Liberty). It was winter again and we’d moved to a “better” apartment. Better is always a rather loose term when describing living situations. Better in our world usually means less expensive and more spacious. It was that. But it was also less insulated that even my parents’ family room. I’d replaced the jiggly table with my Camp Hill High School desk, in its original form, which gave me stability in lieu of surface area. At any rate, I sat in the living room, next to the huge and drafty windows, wrapped from the waist down in an afghan, hatted (I've worn the same winter hat since the photograph, above, was taken) and scarved, my light clipped to a stick that was tied to my desk. It wasn’t pretty, I could tell because I sat next to the front door and every time someone came in, I got to see them grimace at me in sympathetic pain before they moved into the “warmer” parts of the apartment. But that’s what happened.

The punk book (The Punk Ethic) doesn’t really get a specific of story because I’ve worked on it for so long that there are drawings made at each of the given locations. Perhaps I’ve suffered the most to bring it into being but as it has taken so long, I’ve forgotten almost everything about it. (Which is both true and not. Since it takes me a considerably long time to make a finished drawing (20 to 30 hours) I tend to entertain myself with music, movies and audio books. The weird thing is that I can’t tell you on what day I did such-and-such drawing (which is why I date everything) or details like that, but as soon as I see one of my drawings, I can instantly tell you what I was listening to, be it a album, movie, television show or chapters from an audio book. Plus I can tell you where I was sitting, the time of year, the time of day and my mood. Perhaps that’s another reason that I don’t look at my old work.)

Which gets us to today. Today is weird. Today, I’m working on the punk book, finishing the cover. Plus I’m designing the layout for the Salem Witch book. Plus I’m putting the final edits on the internet graphic novel so that I can start drawing the annoying thing. That’s a lot to do. However, I’m sitting at my desk, the new and improved desk with the fancy light and recently re-organized drawer. Next to me, on my fancy new shelves, are literally all my paper supplies and all the rough drawing ideas for each project and space to set each project as I put it aside to work on another one. (And my fancy CBG is only 17 inches from my ever-ready-to-shirk-work-to-play grasp.) The icing on the cake, which is only readily apparent on days like to today when it’s in the mid 90’s in both temperature and humidity, is the gnarly AC unit we were given by friends. For the first time since I started this foolish crusade to make really cool children’s books, I can actually sit comfortably at a spacious and stable desk, see what I’m doing and move from project to project quickly and efficiently.

If I think too hard about this new reality, I might pass out. And that’s how I mark progress. It isn’t about the fame or fortune, because I know very little about such things. It’s about how well I am at improving my ability to take on the next story. What can I say, I’ve always been an optimist. Having something akin to a studio, it’s really just part of my bedroom, is progress.

Since I’ve been busy with the punk cover, preparing paper for the internet graphic novel and designing the witch book, I’ve made no progress on Leviathan Dot Net. Maybe next week.

However, I’ve managed to spend each Sunday night on the roof listening to old jazz and drawing flappers. So if you are in the neighborhood some Sunday night, feel free to lounge with us. You can lay back, enjoy raspy recordings and count the stars (I think there are 32 but that’s only on very clear nights).