How I Lost My New Year's Resolution and Won Summer

For me, summer has different responsibilities than the rest of the year, and her name starts with a Z. It's amazing how one small human can be so much more responsibility than fifty odd farm animals, but so it is. I didn't exactly keep my New Year's Resolution of drawing every single day, but I did keep the spirit of it, remaining creatively productive for most days.

For instance, I worked with Alex Bledsoe to finish The Tufa Coloring Book on time, and put that out mid-August.

And then there was this anthology, Ellipsis, that really came out of nowhere, wanting to publish my story. Which was great! Fine! Wonderful! So I just sent them the story, and watched in amazement as someone else published it. What is this? I thought. Wait, I don't have to do everything? I just write the thing and they do the rest? This is amazing! So that at least gives me the appearance of having done something over the summer, although I really wrote the story a while ago. (Did I ever mention that it came out? It's available! And it has no reviews yet, but I hear it's really funny. And all profits go to charity. How cool is that?)

And somehow, I also hosted several visitors, toured Portugal, and helped my daughter take her sheep, Candy Darling (named by me after that Candy Darling), to win Grand Champion Exotic Animal at the county fair! What a summer!

But now it's over. And I am back to drawing every day. Another book deadline draws nigh: I'm illustrating the children's book, "Murgatroyd Buttercups."

Yesterday, I was working on Murgatroyd's flying.

Murgatroyd Buttercups is due September 27th-ish. 

I've been working with fantasy author Alex Bledsoe, and the result is something beautiful.

Hey, all of you coloring book fans! I just made a beautiful book of pictures for you to color, based on the fantasy novels of Alex Bledsoe. This is the official coloring book of the Tufa, folks! Based on the four Tufa novels and a short story. For those not reading outstanding fantasy fiction, it is simply a book of beautiful pictures of forests and fairies and magic happening in very air itself. For those who are Alex Bledsoe fiction fans, you may just have died and gone to Cloud County.

Order it now, and you can get $2 off the official price of $9.98. That's right, from now until Chapel of Ease hits the shelves on September 6, you can get the official Tufa Coloring Book for only $7.98.

Click here to buy it.

I hope you enjoy coloring it as much as I enjoyed drawing it.

Thank you,

Shoshanah

Feeling Spacey

It came to my attention last night with Professor Batty that, even if you follow this blog religiously, it's difficult to tell what I'm doing with all of these pictures. So, just to clarify:

1. I made a new year's resolution to draw every day, which I have pretty much kept.

2. The drawings fall under three categories:

a. Murgatroyd Buttercups: Murgatroyd Buttercups is a children's book, written by my old friend, Yosha Bourgea. He has asked me to illustrate this funny story for him, and I am happy to oblige. We're shooting for "some time this summer" as a release date.

b. Coloring Book of the Tufa: My friend Alex Bledsoe has asked if I might collaborate with him on a coloring book to accompany his fantasy novels about a race of people called the Tufa. Since I love the novels, I am happy to oblige. The coloring book, which does not yet have an official title, comes out this September, along with his next book, Chapel of Ease.

c. Other stuff! I do have another project in mind, but I don't feel ready to reveal the details, yet. They are still stewing around in my brain.

Today's drawing falls under "Other Stuff":

New Coloring Book of the Tufa

Coming 2016! Alex Bledsoe and I are collaborating on the Official Coloring Book of the *Tufa.

Today, I drew a scene from it... except I took some serious liberties! This guy is supposed to be by a campfire, but I got a bit carried away with the flames. The thing is, the scene is so hellish! But it's more of a mental hellish than a physical hellish. This is drawn from a description in Long Black Curl.

*The Tufa are a mythical people created by Alex Bledsoe. The first book in the series is called, The Hum and the Shiver. I highly recommend it. 

Mash Up

I've worked it out with Alex Bledsoe: we're doing an Official Coloring Book of the Tufa. Huzzah!

In celebration, I did a mash up of my two projects. Here's Alex Bledsoe with a bird... Well, next to his beard. This owlet is just too big for Alex's beard. 

Surprise in Alex Bledsoe's latest book

You know what is cool? When you open a new book from one if your favorite authors, and there's a special thanks to your aunt inside!

Lou Buckingham is my aunt.  I've mentioned before that she is in the Southern rock band Wasted Wine, but she also has a long and prolific solo career. Alex Bledsoe used one if her songs, "Valiant and Fury Girls," in the book Long Black Curl.

   

 I haven't read Long Black Curl yet, but the last two books in the series were amazing. I recommend you start with The Hum and the Shiver. 

The Origins of the Tardis Painting

The first re-imagined thrift store painting I did was the Star Trek One:

I put a picture of it on Facebook and here, and *Alex Bledsoe's wife contacted me, wanting to buy it. They're members of my farm, so when I delivered their eggs that week, I also delivered the Star Trek painting. They were delighted with it, and not only did they pay me money for it, but they said they had another picture sitting around that they really disliked, and,

"maybe you can do something with this." They then gave me a gigantic signed and numbered print of ducks that someone in their family had given them, years ago.

It looked like this:

I had this idea right away that something odd lurked beneath the water. But I thought it should be something the Bledsoe's liked, since they gave me the framed signed and numbered print from 1979. I once saw a child of their's holding a sonic screwdriver. Which gave me an idea... 

That's the Doctor's hand with the sonic screwdriver, coming out of the lake. I guess you know what the tardis is all about. 

I was thinking I would put it in this local gallery and sell it. But then I put it on my wall, and...

It matches all of the dark wood in my house. Art that matches the couch! Everyone's dream. I'm not sure if it's for sale. BAH likes it, too. 

It could happen.

* Read The Hum and the Shiver by Alex Bledsoe, and you will suddenly be impressed that I know Alex Bledsoe. I know that I'm impressed that I know Alex Bledsoe. 

An Ironically Poorly Writen Post About Writing

My dad is nagging me to write a book. Does he even realize that if I write a book, he's going to be in it?

Naw, seriously. He's only in half of it. Or three quarters of it, tops.

I haven't written the book yet, mind you. Just thinking about it gives me anxiety. You see, I have written books before. Terrible books. Fiction books. I sit down, and I say, "I am going to write a book," and I come up with the latest gimmick method (snowflake), and I have to win a Nobel Prize in literature, and get it published by a major publishign house, and everyone has to like it, and, and, and, and, and... nope. I write books not worth reading, actually even embarrassing- embarrassing to myself, not to other people, like this current book.

I have the *title for the new one, which is going to be the truth. And I have the cover art. It's not that I believe in starting at the beginning and proceeding until I reach the end; it just happened that way. I did something unrelated and realized it was perfect. And this time, I'm not going to use a method. It's just going to be you and me, folks. Just like here. And this time, everyone is going to hate it, which is fine. It's my punk rock magnum opus. Scream swear words at me, everyone. Scream them. It's all good.

When I first started writing the blog, I did not at all mean it to be funny. I meant it to be poignant, touching, meaningful, I was going to make you cry, goddamnit! And then this troll stopped by and left a comment once, "You think this shit is funny? This isn't funny!" And I thought, well, no, I didn't think it was funny. Who said it was funny? This random anonymous person just said it was not funny, which must mean it seems like it's actually really funny, because this person feels really bad about himself and puts people down for doing what they do best and then he says it's not funny, which must mean it really is funny, so maybe I should work on being funny and stuff?

I am always unintentionally funny. When I try to be funny, people hate me.

I've noticed something about writers: they happen in clumps. Look at the crowd in Paris in the 1920's. Consider the Dorothy Parker and the Viscous Circle in New York. Or how about Harper Lee and Truman Capote?

When I ran into Alex Bledsoe in the library the other day, which is incidentally where I met him a few years ago, his kid playing with my kid, I felt nervous in the presence of such greatness. I didn't used to feel that way at all, because I hadn't yet read The Hum and the Shiver when I used to feel normal around him. And now that I have read the Hum and the Shiver, I get nervous in his presence. I stuck my head in my tote bag. And then I thought, I really need to act like a normal person right now. So, I took my head out of my tote bag and talked to him like a semblance of a normal person. Alex Bledsoe did what anyone would do right then: he pretended I hadn't just stuck my head inside my tote bag like an ostrich.

Mr. Bledsoe was a guest speaker in one of my classes a long time ago, which was a huge favour, and I read his books the way you read the books of people you know. I felt a sense of duty, when I started. And then the vampire books were so sexual that I was shocked and amused. The fantasy books were fun. The Hum and the Shiver, though, was in a class of its own. It was a fantasy that you could believe to be completely real. And it was about the power of music. As the daughter of a musician, I sort of loved it. And later, when I saw the author, I stuck my head in a tote bag.

The next book in the The Hum and the Shiver series comes out this week.

What if, you just have to wonder, what if the next great place to be is right here and right now? This is Paris, this is New York, this is San Francisco when the beats were on top of the world... this is right now. This is where the there is. Me. You. This.

* The title is, Don't Mind Me; I'm Not Really Here Because, you know what, let's face it: I'm never where the there is!

The World According to Garp and Other Sexual Embarrassments

I have my book club meeting tonight. We read The World According to Garp by John Irving. It wasn't the first time I'd read it.

I find the book disturbing and yet I enjoy reading it. "Like a car wreck," as they say. I love John Irving's writing, but I also agree with Poe Ballentine, who famously wanted to punch him in the face for constantly giving detailed descriptions of little boys' penises.

Maybe it's because I mostly read teen fiction, but John Irving's sexual descriptions constitute too much information for me. But then I have to wonder, would I really like the books as much without it? And the answer is no, I wouldn't like the books as much without the explicit sexual details. They just wouldn't be the same. Garp would not be the same character if we didn't know that he came to being because Jenny Fields molested a mentally disabled war veteran, in all of its explicit detail.

I like being an American, but I also think it's a really American thing to talk too much about one's sex life. At the tender age of nineteen, I ran away to Paris for a few weeks. Walking down the Champs Elysee with my dear friend Jennifer (Okay, so Becca was there, too, but she doesn't play a big role in my memory, Miss "Frankly I'd rather be in Germany..."). Where was I? Yes, nineteen years old, walking down Champs Elysee, in Gay Paris in the Springtime, there was a tour bus load of Americans walking in front of us. A woman was saying, in a clear midwest accent,--- I don't want to say what she said, actually. Suffice to say that she was laying out her sex life in all its explicit details for all of Gay Paris in the Springtime to hear. And I didn't want to hear it! Not at all! Not one little bit! She made me ashamed to be an American.

We do tend to say too much.

I guess writers usually write about sex, regardless of what country they are from... or do they?

I have an acquaintance who is a writer, Alex Bledsoe. I set about to reading all of his books, once I figured out how he made his living. They are very good books, especially The Hum and the Shiver, but what was shocking to me was all of the explicit sex in his vampire novels. I mean, they were fantastic books, but I felt they would be rated X if made into films. This does not actually diminish their greatness in the slightest, but of course, the next time I ran into Alex around town, I blushed. I felt incredibly awkward. I thought, Really? This guy wrote that?

I'm just a prude, I guess. Or a hypocrite, perhaps. I will never write about sex.