Make Everything a Part of Your Wordcount
Go to battle with the army you have, not the one you want.
Show me great novelists who want less time to work on their book and I’ll show you the smallest writers panel of overconfident authors. We all make schedules and get the same twenty-four a day, but boy does life love to pull out the carving knife and take its share. This has been the story in our house for a few weeks. I won’t go into the personal details, but things are leveling out.
Rather than mope about the limitations, I seek comfort in doing the things that supersede the writing time to the best of my ability. With any luck, I’ll glean something usable for a story somewhere. One outstanding task was the fulfillment of some drawings of characters from my novel series as rewards for those who pledged in the Clarion West fundraiser. Not writing, but still a chance to work within the worlds I’ve written.
I did five drawings last year, all supporting characters and one major location for my novel Blackfire. Molly and I traveled in Colorado and Utah when I did them, so they were lo-tech pencils on paper. In fact, after hot days of hiking, Molly dropped me off at the Moab Public Library so I could draw, photograph, and upload the images. It was great fun. This year I pressed on with the drafting and opted to tackle the drawings after the fundraiser. I also opted to do them all hi-tech on my drawing tablet.
It’s funny, I love telling stories with drawings, but I’ve been reluctant to draw Celia and Finwë from the series. There’s such a bond that readers and authors develop with characters with books. So, I didn’t want to “tell” you what these characters look like, because they’re just as much yours as they are mine once you read them. So consider these drawings one option and not as good as yours.
But if you do like this one of Celia, you’re in luck. It’s the last group Stretch Goal. I’ll give it a full-color go over, as if I was doing a comic book cover, or an art print. Which, in fact, it will be. I’ll document the stages of turning it into an art print and make the limited prints available through this newsletter. So stay tuned for the updates and the notice of how to order a print.
Now for house business. As you can see, the changes to the newsletter I alluded to are underway. As Substack grows, it meets more and more of my needs. Along with documenting my writing life, it becomes the home for my podcast, both audio and video versions. The audio version will propagate to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and offer the current and previous season. All archives will be available here for paid members, along with all the video archives, and access to many new items. I’m putting the whole thing together and will update the offerings and details as they come along.
I’m super excited to offer original stories, comics, and art here. There will always be plenty of new free things to read, listen, and watch here, but there will also be a lot of exclusive things for members too.
Oh, here’s the latest episode of the Big Story Podcast with comic book writer Deniz Camp. It’s a great conversation with a writer smack-dab in the crossroads of culture, class, and career.
