The book. Fairy Tale Remnants. I've been working on it for the past six months, two years if you include all the artwork. Every free moment, the moments that weren't free, time I should have been doing something else, I spent on that book. Letting dinner burn on the stove while I tried to teach myself InDesign. Hours learning how to put it together.Figuring it out on the fly, realizing afterward there was a better way to do this or that. Next time. Next book.
Why did I do it in the first place? I have a home, a family, my son is 12. I'm an artist, my husband is an artist. Negotiating financial survival in a city like Los Angeles is stressful enough. Carving out time to make art, making a living as a freelance artist is hard enough. Why did I want another project?
I was angry. I did all the right things, went to openings, was consistent in my art practice, exhibiting in galleries whenever and wherever I could, had collectors that bought my work, but it didn't feel like it mattered. Social media is great, I connect with a larger audience for my paintings that I couldn't have imagined 20 years ago, when I was toiling away like a hermit in my studio pre-internet, but I was still pissed off.
What was the problem? Why was I so angry? It came to me out of utter despair. I wanted to share my paintings, my thoughts, with people, and I wasn't feeling it. I make artwork about a world that rarely makes sense to me. At best, a world that seems absurd; at worst, terribly frightening. I was sure other people felt the same way, and that seeing these painted allegories in waking life made would make them feel better.
It hit me like a ton of bricks. These paintings belonged together in a book. Not only because they were telling a bigger story, but because in a book a person could be alone with all of them, on their terms. The illustrations, dreams, thoughts in prose could all be theirs, in their own private space.
I had to work backwards and extract the words from the artwork, get it all into a book and get the book out into the world.
Joining self-publishing groups on Facebook, I took notes on problems and solutions using Amazon's KDP for print on demand books. I watched tutorials on the finer points of typesetting (and burned more dinners in the process). Reading up on the newest approaches for planting the right keywords for a book to be found in searches, I had a thick folder of words, categories, and diagrams. Flipping through these papers, some of the information became familiar as though I’d known these things for years, and some of the writing looked like it was done by a lunatic creating unintelligible code.
Then there was social media. Not only was I an artist and designer but an author as well. I needed the official branding of me to follow suit with the life transformation I was crafting as I was metamorphosing into this new creature. I'm still burning dinners while learning about how to prepare a better press kit.
My book. I finished it, I'm proud of it. A woman contacted me today telling me how she identified with the piece "Birthday Party" in Fairy Tale Remnants. She knew that faraway look of exhaustion in the mother's eyes, the pining for the last balloon to burst. She wasn't the only one that had that unnamable combination of feelings. She knew I knew it, too.
