Self-justification

I’m kind of excited today because my new camera is supposed to be delivered tomorrow. It’s a pretty fancy one and acquiring it has entailed a long struggle with my internal demons. First of all, as one of my voice loudly declaims on a regular basis. I don’t really need a fancy camera. I have a smallish camera that I was very excited to get a couple of years ago and which takes perfectly good pictures.

But the real reason I’m getting this new supercamera is to make videos. And, yes, I have a couple of smallish video cameras that are perfectly capable of capturing a moving image and getting it onto YouTube, but I have a dream. The dream is of making videos about drawing, capturing what is beautiful in the world and how I and my friends get that beauty down on paper.  But I want to go way beyond the instructional films I’ve seen around, not just step-by-step, “this is how to paint a fruit bowl” sort of things but videos that are as beautiful as the process they record. After decades of making commercials for other people, I want to apply all of that experience to filming what I love really well. We’ll see how that turns out.

Anyway, so I have most of me convinced that this is a legitimate endeavor and use of my savings, but as I say it took a fair amount of self-doubt to get there. I don’t know about you, but when I find a new passion, I tend to spend a disproportionate amount of time researching what other people think and do with the same interest before I allow myself to make a commitment. And I can also do a lot of shopping for accessories and supplies and doodads before I actually get to work doing what I had originally set out to do.

I mean, it’s so much easier to shop for art supplies than to use them.

I think that’s why, when I first started drawing fifteen years or so ago, I imposed a lot of restrictions on myself, like only drawing with a Uniball in a not very fancy book. Then gradually, as a reward for my commitment, I let myself get a few grey brush markers, and then a few others, then some colored pens, then a better quality sketchbook and then a Rapidograph. That point took a couple of years to reach. I think if I had indulged my urge to shop any further I would have gotten into way more than I could handle. Instead of forcing myself to learn each medium well, I would have started to wrestle with complexities I didn’t understand and would have just gotten so bogged down and frustrated that I would have lost my will to go on.

Eventually, after allowing for gradual expansion and experimentation, I settled on the materials that work best for me and the way I choose to express myself right now. I know them well and know how they work, how they misbehave, were the pitfalls lie, how to make them sing fairly in tune.

Now, a new fancy camera with lots of knobs and buttons may prove frustrating or distracting. I can easily imagine that I could get sidetracked by the gizmo itself, spend lots of time reading its manual. working my way through all its menus, consulting with others, etc. But because I have  a goal in mind and am going to learn how to make the thing in my head rather than become a professional photographer who can handle any technical situation, I will be able to create something that will give me confirmation rather than frustration.

I think that’s so key in developing a new skill. Not endlessly playing scales or drawing perfect lines and circles, but getting right in there and expressing something that matters to you. That’s why illustrated journaling had kept my interest for so long, not because I am just studying drawing but because I am using drawing as a tool to learn about the world around me,  capturing the beauty of every day, discovering how I feel about the treasures that surround me.

So, hopefully, I will learn how to get this camera to make the images I see in my head, in a clearer deeper way than I ever have before. I will capture the emotions I feel in drawing, what makes the process beautiful and magical, will create scenes that will help inspire others too.

Failing that, well, I’ll hang onto the receipt.

What do you think?

Let’s face it, one of the most important parts of making things lies beyond our ability to control — other people’s reactions to our work. Right?
“Hey, mom, look what I made.” That’s wonderful, let’s hang it on the fridge.”
Or “What is it now? Can’t you see I’m on the phone?”
It’s one of the most difficult parts of being a creative person. Not the fun, satisfying, unfurling of an idea, but the cold crickets that confront it or the “yes, but” of the professional critic or the form rejection letter or worse the anticipation of rejection that stops the egg from ever even popping into the nest.
We may not make it for others but a work is not fully realized until it bounces off another’s eyeballs, vibrates their eardrums or rearranges some of the cells deep within their corpus callosum.
And praise can be as insufficient as a shrug. We don’t just want a pat on the head; we want connection, reaction, insight, something that makes us see what we made in a newer light or on a deeper plain. Knowing we moved someone else, revealed truth to them, reminded them of something we didn’t even know corresponded, that makes us love our work all the more. Love it and wonder at it, at the fact that we were the conduit for it, that something passed through us and then passed through another heart. It dissolves the loneliness of existence.
Ideally, our art is the truest manifestation of our conclusions about the nature of things and when someone else sees it and validates it and shares it, the power of that truth is reflected back on itself like an endlessly repeating mirror.
That’s why rejection hurts, because, yes, we feel our efforts are wasted, and, yes, that we don’t matter and, yes, we didn’t make a ripple on the surface of the earth, all true. But mainly because we wonder whether the magic we found is really magic, whether the revelation we thought so profound was just a single serving glimmer of something too puny and insufficient to be shared, a whistle in the dark, not a full-blown hallelujah chorus with kindred spirits chiming in.
The true value of acknowledgment isn’t registered in the ego; it’s the opposite, a breaking down of the barriers between creator and audience so that we can unite in a shared appreciation of something that lends beauty and meaning to the grinding metronome of the day. We see a glimpse of the heavens together, a view that appeared to one of us first but is now a canopy over us all.
It’s even true of a joke, a shared laugh, the quick bark of recognition that our minds thought alike, we saw the other’s insight, and we were able to escape together from the smooth ivory prison of our skulls for a moment.
When I hear from people who like my work, or more importantly found something in my work that made their day a little brighter, I like my work more too. And when a reader has an insight or can tell me of a particular sentence that strummed their strings, I have insight into where to go next, into what matters in what I’ve done.
And conversely, of course, if my work pulls up lame and doesn’t find much of an audience, I wonder where I went wrong or why I thought something was worth my time but proved not to be worth anyone else’s.
So to all of you who have read my books or thought about my work and then have had something either nice or, even better, something honest to say about it, thanks very much and please know that it’s those sticks and carrots that are the kindling for works ahead.

Peanut. The Graphic Novel(ish)

Well, for those who have yet to consume Peanut the Paperback or Peanut the e-book, here’s a sample of Peanut the Graphic Novel. I hope you enjoy it but please be content with this helping. It’s all I could be bothered to do and no more will be forthcoming.

God, Graphic novels are an insane amount of work! But fun (ish).

(Click on each page to enlarge)

Prebreakfast rant

Go on, write  another blogpost about Peanut.

But I haven’t had my damned breakfast yet.

Just do it.

Oh, fine.

Well, much as I love to draw, I also love to write. So this book, Peanut, the first one I’ve published that’s all about the writing, is like my shy bookish child who generally doesn’t come out when company’s around but is rather in a corner, nose between the pages, building up a steamy head of potential and finally stepping into the limelight to get her due. Now, you might say, if she’s so great why is she appearing on Blurb rather than on the front table of your corner Barnes & Gobble? Is she somehow lesser? Does her picturelessness make her somehow less worthy of someone’s hard-earned pennies? Seriously, there are gazillions of paperbacks clawing at the  eyeballs of readers, jockeying to be read, and here you come with some sordid little manuscript and expect people to drop their kindles and snap it up? Be real, man, your illustrated books are being sold in Chinese bookstores, this is penny ante stuff. This little amusebouche isn’t gracing the front page of the Times Book Review. It’s not being chatted about on Morning Edition. Oprah hasn’t put her imprimatur on its cover.  You dont see Jonathan Franzen uploading his books to Blur, do you?

True, true and true. The fact is the publishing world has a mighty machine built over a couple of centuries for grinding out books and profits and making sure everyone everywhere gets to read the same stuff at the  same time. And the next fact is that self-publishing or ‘vanity publishing’ is a grimy little by-way a salon de refusés, full of conspiracy theorists and weekend poets that drizzles out awkwardly typeset drivel with badly designed cover art.

But here are some more relevant and freshly made facts. Thanks to the publishing colossus, it’s impossible for 99% of writers to survive as writers. Even really good ones end up spending most of their time teaching in creative writing departments of lesser-know midwestern colleges or cranking out reams of ad-copy or making half-caff lattes or flipping burgers or just giving up altogether. Now, no one owes writers a living as writers and the prevailing ethic in our society is that if you were any good you could make a living at your craft, but a glance at the Times Bestseller list shows that to do so you have to be James Patterson or Nora Roberts to make ends meet in the publishing world and that the majority of people who get to spend their-full time live making books are editors, publishers, printers, publicists, and agents — not writers.

Now, I love all of my editors and publishers and printers and such, but not so much that they deserve to get 92% of your money whenever you buy one of my books. I mean, I put up with it, but come on. 92%?

Writers have bitched about this inequity since Dickens’ day and finally we have an alternatives. In today’s Times, you can read about Susan Orleans venture into Amazon Singles where she gets 70 cents on every dollar. (She’s a big deal writer of course and is able to get a big article in a big paper to promote her little book so she’s hardly typical). E-books give writers a slightly larger bite of the pie. We get 25% royalties on all the books that publishers don’t need to print or  warehouse or ship or even lift a finger to reproduce.  But, as has happened in the music business, the real opportunity for writers is to short the chain that connects us to our readers. To make books available without all the middle men. That means readers get books faster (it can take over a year or more for a book to go from the author through the production machine and into your local bookstore) and cheaper (seriously, $30 for a new hardcover?) and more. More because when your favorite authors can focus on making books instead of burgers, you end up with more books you love.

It’s all up to authors to take more leaps into the new order of things and try their hand at self-promotion and self-production. And that is possible and fairly simple when you make a book that’s all text. Most of my books, illustrated, four-color, beautifully printed, are partnerships between me and a group of editors and designers who really add value and earn some (if not all) of their 92%. But when it comes to a straightforward book like Peanut, well, it’s not that hard to make it available to readers in an edition that is virtually the same as they’d find  in a  bookstore,

There are still a lot of things to be worked out. publishing on demand is still a fairly expensive model. And I have no idea if most of my readers have kindles  nooks and ipads and such. If they did it would be easier to make sand distribute electronic books that include color and even video demonstrations and commentary. That may be a few years away and frankly the publishing world doesn’t have that much incentive to make it happen. Instead, we, authors and readers can make that more common and available by supporting authors who show interest in inventing new ways of distribution.

I hope I haven’t created the impression that I am begging for your money here.

Believe me, I do fine toiling in the salt mines of advertising and will hopefully do so for some time.But it would be nice to think that an author who has a base of loyal readers might be able to connect with them directly and together they could provide an atmosphere in which writers could spend more time and effort making the books we all love.

I also realize that none of this is a particularly persuasive reason to buy and read Peanut in particular*. The fact that it’s self published on Blur (like many other books I probably wouldnt read), shouldnt make it a must buy. But if you like my writing, and the idea of the book, and have looked at a few pages in the free sample preview, then don’t let the fact that it is coming to you through this more untraditional venue hold you back from buying a copy.

You will be joining me at the barricades, striking another blow for creativity liberty, and breathing heavily down the hunched backs of the  capitalist running dogs. Vive la revolution!

Alright, now can we eat breakfast?

No, first, ask them nicely to buy a copy of  PEANUT here.

I think I’ll have marmite on toast….

—-

* Il’ll try to do a better job of selling you on  Peanut, in the days ahead.

Super cool and exciting: A new book! From me!

When Patti was pregnant, so was I. Pregnant with a book that turned our endless nine months+ into 250+ pages of memoir. I have been working on Peanut in various forms ever since, if you can believe it. It’s tried being a regular book, a graphic novel, and an online serial. And now, finally, here it is a readable form you can carry around with you and read until your are fully entertained and edified.

Back then, I was terribly interested in the experience of becoming a father and I just couldn’t find much that was practical that had been written about it. After the book was written, I came to realize that it was tricky to fill this void in the bookstore in the standard way. Because books need to be shelved in particular sections at your local Barnes & Noble or even on Amazon, no one knew quite where to put my book. It was sort of  a memoir (back in the days before memoirs were routinely bestsellers) but more specific. And it wasn’t really appropriate for the pregnancy section because it was about a man’s experience. Anyway, it got kicked around by a bunch of publishers and finally got punted into the weeds.

I always felt that was  a shame as I really liked it; I think it’s by far the funniest book I’ve written and re-reading it as I have been recently, it cracked me up over and again. I think it’s also very insightful, about what it means to be  a parent and yet remain the child of one’s parents and grandparents.

It’s also a shame because it helps to explain an awful lot about me, about the family forces that shape my view of the world and the uniques experience I had as a kid. Slowly but surely, the most important events in my life, good and bad, are becoming books — Everyday Matters; my new book on Patti’s death; and this, the prequel, Peanut.

Anyway, I have had it with trying to flog the book in the traditional way. But I really do want people to read it. So I have decided to have a number of copies printed up to see if you, the people who have supported my work for years, might be interested in reading it and maybe helping me birth it in some form. It’s a little paperback, decent quality with one of my paintings on the cover. It doesn’t contain any drawings or even the word ‘drawing’ but if you like the way I write and share my perspective on the world, you might find it entertaining. And if you’ve ever been a parent or a child, I think it’ll be right up your alley.

The book is available now —and you might want to act now. This may sound like a hucksterish pitch (though it’s 100% true, I swear) but the printer just told me they will be raising the price by a dollar in the next 48 hours. I think the book is worth that additional dollar but, if that gives you pause, please order it today or tomorrow (May 18th). Or wait till the weekend and spring for the extra buck. Your call. Or, better yet, get in under the deadline and order yourself a dozen or so copies and sell them to the neighbors for an additional 50 cents and pocket the difference. I won’t tell.

Order PEANUT here

If you get it, let me know what you think. And how you think we can collectively make it into a bestseller that will transform parenting as we know it. I welcome your collaboration and critique.

Thanks to everyone who supports my book and has ordered the book so far. If this experiment is successful, I will publish more books in this sort of immediate, hand made way in the future.