Argentinian Western Cartoonists of Note

I recently discovered two Argentinian cartoonists referenced in an interview of Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, a Spanish born artist raised in Argentina who drew many favorite U.S. superhero comics from my childhood. These artists were early influences on Lopez, and Lopez deserves a post of his own, but here is some work from Victor De La Fuente and Carlos Roume.

Here's Victor De La Fuente's Lambiek entry.

And Here are some sample of his work:

And here's an obituary for Carlos Roume in the Comics Reporter with some details from his professional life.

And some samples: 

Figure Study on Toned Paper

Yesterday we had a full session pose and so I wanted to try something on a little nicer paper. Someone gave me a sheet of toned charcoal paper and I worked in pencil with white conte highlights. I hadn't worked that way in many years, and it's not a way that I feel too terribly comfortable working, but aside from a few nitpicks,  I don't think it came out half bad. This was a pose based on Michelangelo, a figure from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

And for comparison:

Though I think Michelangelo might be one up on me on this one.

Two Pirate Kids in a Boat

Thanks everyone for yesterday's birthday wishes, I a good birthday, had cake, and now I have to get back to work! So here's some more pirate kids from my work in progress:

A lot more to resolve yet, but I'm getting closer to inks on my mini self-promo wordless pirate kid book!

Happy Birthday to Me! More Pirate Kids!

So my desktop computer has been out of commission for nearly a week, so I haven't had access to photoshop, and so haven't had the opportunity to post. I'll try to make up for it in what little remains of the month. Here are some more pirate kids from my tiny handmade book in progress:

Happy Birthday to Me!


Today I'm entering the twilight of my 30s at the ripe age of 39! How did that happen? It would seem that I share a birthday with Amelia Earhart. Here's me and Amelia in one of our finer hours:

The Pirate Kids Do Battle!

More pirate kids for my little 32 page handmade wordless book. This one going to go out to publishers, but I'm working on a way to offer a much cheaper version to everyone else. Right now It's just in the sketch phase, but I'm just starting to figure out my compositions, so it won't be too long. I'm having a great time with this one!

Another Pirate Kid

Another pirate kid sketch. This one without much bother to erase the construction lines, so its a bit messy.

Another Pirate Girl

Another pirate girl drawing for my wordless handmade book in progress...

New Pirate Kid and Dogs!

So here's another pirate kid sketches with some random dog

poses. Enjoy!

Last Night's Figures

So these are from last night's figure session. The first is an hour pose, and then I gave it another hour of rendering at home.The second is a 5 minute pose, and the last is a 10 minute pose.

Yet More Pirate Kids

So here are some pirate kids and a pirate dog for the hand bound, wordless self-promotional book I'm in the process of making. One more figure to go, and then backgrounds! Oh, and inking and coloring and binding and pfew...

Another Pirate Kid

Another pirate kid. Many, many more to come. 

Pirate Kid sketch

A figure for  a modest self-promotional project, what will hopefully end up as a little hand bound, 32 page wordless book. I've been drawing a lot lately, just not posting, which I should probably do. I'm doing all the figures first, then the backgrounds, since figures are always the hardest part for me. So right now it's just figures, figures, figures, and about three more to go of 30+ before I ink the whole mess. Lots of sequential action in this. Having a great time! Will post more...

Water study

This water was intended for the little girl in the previous post, but the composition never quite came together. Still, I'm happy with the individual elements, such as the water here: 

Girl Reading

Comics and Language: or Why Comics are Completely and Totally Awesome

Generally, people don't tend to fully understand the medium and how it works even when they've read a bunch of comics over their lifetime. People often are looking for the quality of the draftsmanship and general story as a judge of the quality of the strip, without understanding what comics do best and how they do it. I've seen a lot of well drawn comics that work lousy as comics, and some comics that are well drawn, but not in the sense of traditional draftsmanship.

For example: Peanuts is well drawn, in that Schulz uses his cartoon language in a very deliberate and meaningful way. It didn't just come out that way because he couldn't draw a guy with a normal-sized head. He's able to communicate on an emotional level with the simplest of symbols, and make every dot and squiggle count. This is why looking at the individual drawings doesn't give you a sense of what he's achieved. If you've never seen Charlie Brown before, a single drawing of Charlie Brown doesn't have much emotional content. But over the course of the strip, Charlie Brown becomes undeniably Charlie Brown. There's no separating the drawing from his personality in your mind, and the transmission of the information is instant.

Superman is less effective, because of all the various interpretations of the character, but still, that distinctive costume and it's associations also have some instant emotional content, but it's less specific than Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown is like a letter in an very specific alphabet. Even more so than a written word. As you read the strip, you learn the language of Charlie Brown, and the more you read the strip the more that language is enriched for you. The drawing itself begins to carry more meaning as you read the story over time. Not just the characters, but the sofas, and footballs and birdhouses. While traditional language can become enriched by your understanding of it over time, no symbol or character outside of cartooning can contain that kind of history and richness on its own. Pictographic language like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics can, but that, in its way, is comics! Really, any book that can't be read and understood without the pictures is essentially comics, which includes many kinds of picture books. Even drawn instructions in instruction manuals use the same principal.

So that's one of the reasons that comics are completely and totally awesome! Comics as a language has enriched my understanding of language in general. And the universality of the language is also pretty fascinating. Someone from an Asian country can make a wordless comic that, aside from very specific cultural references, I can essentially understand There's no other language like that in the world. But pictures in general are still cultural and have different cultural significance in themselves, and aboriginal cultures not exposed to these kind of pictures might not be able to interpret them.

Also different cultures have different pictorial histories, so just the shape of a Schulz football and how the marks are made, aside from its footballness, are a reference to our culture because of the way we make marks, and the history behind how we make those marks. Take another culture's specific pictorial vocabulary and its origins, say, Japanese woodblock printing and Kanji, that give Japanese comics their own vocabulary that is uniquely understood in a different way by Japanese than by us because of the style of mark making itself and how Japanese people are immersed in their own culture from birth. But you still have some universal symbols, like the way babies can understand a smiley face, that I imagine even aboriginal cultures would get.

This is why I'm completely and totally fascinated by the medium and find it hard to understand why everyone isn't! It's why I'm attracted to even the crappiest comics (aside from the fact that I just like superheroes and rocket ships), because there's always something to discover in how the artist uses symbols, because an artist can't help but draw in their own unique symbol vocabulary. 

Ladybug and Gentleman Beetle on Red Fox!

I'm very excited to be introducing my new Early reader book, Ladybug and Gentleman Beetle for the first time on the Red Fox Literary site. As per my agent Abigail Samoun’s wishes while she's away, I posted my first blog post today about my new work in progress, “Ladybug and Gentleman Beetle” on the Red Fox Literary blog. Abigail and I worked together extensively on the manuscript and she helped me polish up the blog post so it was just perfect, so I hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Please tweet and repost to help me get the word out! the link is http://redfoxliterary.blogspot.com/2012/06/ladybug-and-gentleman-beetle.htmland of course the Red Fox Literary site, http://redfoxliterary.com And congratulations of Abigail’s new baby!

Dancing Queen

Another series of images inspired by my new model, Ella. Ella was kind enough to dance for me, and I got some great photos that captured her in action.

Another Ballerina

Another dancer sketch for a work in progress, another great Ella pose!

Ballerina

Here's a sketch for another sequential action piece in progress, using my favorite model, Ella! Even though she was a little out of practice, Ella put on tutu and danced for me, and I took some really great photos to work from.

The next day her mother e-mailed me to tell me that Ella had a play date with two little boys, and so I gave them a foam rubber sword and axe I got at the dollar bin at Target, and the three of them became pirates! So lots more to come.

New Wednesday Figure

Here's a new figure study done last night. I added some tones and rendered it up a little more this morning, since the original study was just a little less than an hour. I tried to get as much info as I could to elaborate. There's only so much you can get in an hour, and I'm not typically a fast worker, but I'm pretty happy with this one.

Red Fox Literary's First Year Anniversary!

So this week my agent Abigail Samoun and her partner Karen Grencik celebrate the first year of their agency, Red Fox Literary! This week's Red Fox blog features birthday themed art by many of the talented folks they represent to celebrate the occasion! Here's my own contribution:

 and you can see the rest here. 

It was a big honor to be chosen to be represented by Abigail last year, and so far  it's been a very productive and enlightening relationship. Not only do I have the gift of a great agent, but a great editor, and she's been instrumental in my recent improvement as an illustrator and writer for young readers. I can't thank Abi enough. She'll also be celebrating another birthday soon--that of her her new baby! So congratulations Abi on both birthdays!

Girl Playing with Blue Ball

So here's the finish. Some of the poses are based on photos of my neighbor, Ella, and some are from my imagination, and just from getting a feel of how she moved and played from watching her. 

With this one, I kept the color simple, reminiscent of the limited color and action in my inspiration for this one, Hilary Knight's work on Eloise. I love doing sequential action, and I really had a great time with this one.

Masked figure

Here was a figure that I still want to redraw. It's not bad, but not quite what I was after. 

I wanted to do a companion piece to the first Easter image with two girls, one with a mask. I always admired Renee French's masked figures, and I wanted to try the motif myself. Time allowing, I'll return to the subject. Images of children with masks on has both a sense of play, and an eerie sense of anonymity and mystery. I used to love masks and costumes as a kid, and the idea of becoming someone else. In a way, masks do transform you, since your facial expression, or a part of it is concealed, and this is how people recognize your identity and what you're feeling. This is why even whimsical or silly masks can be a little scary, an are a motif so often used in horror movies. But then, this figure isn't very scary, is it? Not that that's my intention, but it doesn't quite contain the sense of mystery that I was going for. Instead it's just kind of cute.

June Figure Study in Dry Brush

This is a 2 hour dry brush study from life:

The pose was based a classic Michelangelo sculpture entitled, "Night."

It was a difficult pose to hold, but the model did an admirable job. having modeled myself, I have a real appreciation for the skill. Staying still for long periods of time and resuming a difficult pose like this after a break is no easy task. Afterwards it feels like you've been through a  hard workout.

This is the first time I've used my dry brush technique to draw from life, and it was a very satisfying experience. I love drawing the figure, and dry brush is my current favorite medium, so it was a rare pleasure. I penciled the drawing out first with a 2B pencil, and then started in with my usual mixture of acrylic and india ink. There are a few things I might have done differently--dry brush is a pretty unforgiving medium.  Accidents and all, you have to go with what you got. But there were some happy accidents too, and I'm generally pleased with the results. I think it's the first figure I've done that I feel like I could hang on the wall, so it represents a bit of a benchmark for me.

 About three and a half years ago I started drawing from life seriously for the first time since college, and I feel like I'm finally starting to hit stride. It's one of  the most challenging subjects you can draw, and it's long been a goal of mine to develop my life drawing skills to a point of real confidence and I feel like I'm starting to head in that direction. That doesn't mean I don't have a lot more to learn--I hope to continue learning and improving for the rest of my life--but I do feel like I'm starting to achieve a level of proficiency that I didn't have in the past. 

Another Girl With Ball

Another pencil image of my girl playing with a ball sequence:

Sequential action is so much how I would like to approach children's books in general. My two greatest influences in this area are Raymond Briggs who did the Snowman, and Hilary Knight who illustrated the Eloise. I can't get me enough of that Eloise. She's all over the pages, riding elevators and dancing and causing all kinds of mischief. The recently collected the whole series of four books. The other three have been out of print forever, so I recommend snatching it up!

What's The Citizen Kane of Comics?

Citizen Kane has long been used as a gold standard for film, and has since become a generic analogy for greatness that is often applied to other media. It's been a favorite of Neil Gaiman, when in the 80s he declared comics to be an exciting new medium because it hadn't discovered its Citizen Kane yet. Later he decided that Will Eisner's Spirit was "the Citizen Kane of comics," even though The Spirit saw print about 40 years prior to his first statement, but he's perfectly entitled to change his mind. But apparently he didn't change his mind about Citizen Kane.


But I'm not fully on board with the assumption. I think it's a landmark film, and formally inventive in a way that no film had been prior, but calling it the greatest film in history discounts some of the great films made abroad in that same era, and of course, since. Welles' acting is, as usual, hammy, even by the standards of the time, as is the acting of much of the Mercury Theater cast, most of whom were new to film acting, and the writing--well it aint Tennessee Williams. And no matter what my personal opinion is of the film, giving it this status assumes the primacy of US cinema in a way that has been typical of American film criticism of the past. And I suppose I'm just tired of the Citizen Kane reference because it's so often repeated and so often repeated reflexively, as though Citizen Kane was the unquestioned high mark of cinema just because we're told it is.

So as much as I understand that it's useful to communicate the value of comics to the uninitiated by comparing it to other media, the Citizen Kane reference is a tired one, and comics aren't aren't like other media. For one, the greater part of comics history is dominated by comics targeted at children. It was, and sometimes continues to be considered a children's medium, and it took considerable bull-headedness in the face of indifference for those early cartoonists to make great art in that environment. 


Comics truly targeted at adults only started to happen in the mid sixties, and comics that attempted to be literary, Art with a capital "A", only happened in the last couple of decades. I know there were early exceptions, but this has been the general trend. So there's this uncomfortable relationship that cartoonists have had with comics history that is difficult to reconcile considering audience. Maybe Krazy Kat is Citizen Kane, or Eisner's Spirit, if we were to go with the assumption behind this analogy, but it still doesn't make sense. Only a minority of people understand comics historically, formally and as literature, and literary and film critics who are responsible for more mainstream comics criticism don't have that background. So dropping the analogy to film is useful. Comics need to be taught just as film and literature is taught, and when something like Persepolis is reviewed by the New York Times, it's important that the author of that review has real context for the work, that they're not thinking of it as formally comparable to film or prose. Or Citizen Kane. 

Girl with Ball

I'm working on a series of images based on some pictures I took of my six year old neighbor playing with an exercise ball. Here's a pencil drawing for one of them:

Me and Moebius, San Diego Comicon Circa 1987!

Now it can be told.

So here I am at 13, having my first  nerdgasm, getting my copy of Upon a Star autographed by none other than the late great Jean Giraud, AKA Moebius! Photo courtesy of Josh's mom.



So lets see: it looks like a plate from the now extremely rare City of Fire portfolio Moebius did with then unknown, Geof Darrow is hanging behind him. Wish I bought that. You might be able to get it for a grand now on E-bay. I don't remember him having a beard. Look at those jacked up bangs! Clearly my mom cut my hair. Couldn't she have sprung for Supercuts?  The knit shirt and likely, corduroy pants were typical of my attire of that era. To think that I would have been a hipster if I looked this way in the late 90s. I imagine my much more fashion savvy friend Josh wore feathered hair, jeans and a Cramps t-shirt, so my look does seem to have weathered the years a little better than his.  What cruel, cruel irony. Girls always liked Josh. I remember then being fond of the Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson song, "Say,Say, Say," if that gives you any indication of my musical tastes. Josh liked The Cramps and Stray Cats. At the time, Josh was developmentally about 18, and I was about 8. Together we made one 13 year old kid.

That was back when Comicon was for the most part actually about comics, and maybe a little sci-fi. In fact, speaking of sci-fi I remember seeing Walter Koenig AKA Chekov from Star Trek in the hallway. I pointed at him and said like a huge spaz, "It's Walter Koenig! It's Walter Koenig!" He turned around, looked at me and said, "Stop pointing at me, it's annoying," before turning his back on me and walking away. I felt completely deflated. I loved Star Trek. It was before all those other Star Treks so to the Trekkies, he still ranked high in the pantheon, and Comicon was their temple of worship. But Josh was less impressed. He said, "What a dick. He should be glad you even know his name," which made me feel a little better. He should have, dammit! I  even pronounced it correctly! Moebius, on the contrary, was extremely polite, and accepted my spazziness with grace.

Nerd Stuff

Moebius was the highlight of my trip, and eclipses all the other guests in my memory, but I do still have the program somewhere and recall a few others, like Kirby and Eisner and good old Stan Lee. I did wait in line to see Stan Lee, but by then, it was already starting to be popularly recognized that Lee had unfairly taken the lion's share of the credit, so he had already lost a bit of his shininess in my eyes. Still, Lee was the definition of avuncular if ever there was one, and you can't help loving the guy. He has this art of talking to everyone in this intimate, just you and me, kid, way. One of the dealers had given me their 70s copy of Bring on The Bad Guys to have signed by him, and I remember in exchange for the favor, the dealer gave me a copy of any comic I wanted on his table. I chose this book called "Ex-Mutants" an X-menish knock-off drawn by future 90s fan favorite Ron Lim, for anyone keeping score. What's Ron Lim doing these days?

Even Nerdier Stuff

Oh, there was Paul Chadwick somewhere in there, and I was just starting to become a fan of Concrete. Somehow I seemed to miss a lot of the other big personalities. This wasn't the Comicon of today, so what I mean by "big personalities" was Sergio Aragones, not Quentin Tarantino. You also didn't run into quite so many Stormtroopers. There were costumes, but costumes weren't as much the thing. It was mostly lots and lots of comics nerds, and meeting the artists and buying back issues was our main objective. That was before E-bay, so comics conventions were the best places to find those rare books you were looking for. But I did discover and fall in love with Jan Strnad and Dennis Fujitake's Dalgoda, with very Moebiusesque art by Fujitake, but something was lost when the series went into outer space with issue 2. That first well worn double-sized issue is one I still treasure, and there also that great looking Kevin Nowlan back-up that still looks pretty gorgeous. I got Ted Mckeever's first book, Eddy Current. I remember talking to Paul Kupperberg for at least an hour, because he was one of the few guys who was willing to talk to me, even though I hadn't read anything he had ever written. But then, not many people were coming to his table, which was a little sad. I mean, he'd written quite a few comics for DC. But I nerdgress...

And in Conclusion...

Aren't you never supposed to write, "in conclusion in your conclusion? So I still have my Moebius-signed copy of Upon a Star. It's pretty beat-up, and it's got a big ink stain on it from sitting on my drawing board so much while I was trying to learn how to draw. Josh used to always give me a hard time about how I treated my comics--I had lowered their precious "mint" status to something below "fine" or worse, and they would surely fail to increase in value. Little did he know that most of the 80s comics we bought back then can be foundon e-bay for about the same price we paid for them then. In fact, I've bought back a number of the comics I got rid of  back in the 90s, after college. I'm still buying 80s comics that I felt like I missed out on, Like Aztec Ace and everything published by PC unless it was by Neil Adams, with the exception of the so bad it's brilliant Skateman.

After about 18 years I caught up with Josh again recently at a coffee shop. He brought his 15 year old kid, who had inherited Josh's maturity, if not his worldliness. I always liked his parents His dad was this amazing sculptor.And I still love Moebius, who died before he really was supposed to, which I still think is unfair. Thanks Mia, for the great photo! Oh the memories...

Easter Image Complete!

So here's the finished easter image, done with the help of my six year old neighbor Ella who was kind enough to model for me!

I'm experimenting a bit more with my use of space. One of my favorite illustrators, Lizbeth Zwerger is fantastic at using white space and big areas of emptiness, something I've been trying to o a lot more. There's always that sense that the white space needs to be filled just because it's empty. So here I thought I'd activate the edges and make the image less about what's planted in the middle, as so often tends to be the focal point in my images. I'm anxious to experiment with this way of working more.

Wednesday Figures

Two twenty minute poses. 

Two posts in one day! I think that breaks the rules or something. I thought about posting this tomorrow, but once I had it all scanned, I figured, why not? 

Another Easter Girl, Using the Computer as a Compositional Tool

Here's another Easter girl, inks for a new image I'm working on. In another one of those painful cropping decisions, this one got cropped out at the waist, so this will be my only opportunity to show off her pretty braids..

The Computer as Compositional Tool

With some of these self motivated pieces my initial plan for the composition is a little buttery. I have a basic idea, but then after I ink the figures I start moving them around to see if they fit in better places than where I had originally planned them. This was one of those cases. It requires a bit more work, since I'm cropping out parts of the figures that I wouldn't have had to ink with better planning, but it's a process I enjoy when time allows. Often it provides new discoveries and new possibilities that wouldn't have occurred to me in the initial thumbnail stage. Of course, this is no way to work on deadline or in a collaboration, but it's one advantage that the computer allows with self-motivated work.

Often when people refer to the computer as a drawing and painting tool, they don't mention how much of an amazing compositional tool it can be. Moving stuff around, cropping, taking risks on a whim that you wouldn't be able to do with traditional media. When I fully render a figure like this that may or may not be cropped, or even omitted from the composition altogether--I get to act as a kind of studio photographer.  When figures are rendered, they don't always have the same character as your sketches.You may lose some of the freshness of original sketch, or you may discover something new, but the composition itself can be another opportunity to add a fresh an spontaneous approach to the image.

Of course, there are limits, and it's important to make sure the figures work in the perspective I've created--you do want to make sure their feet are planted in the right place! Since it isn't an actual three dimensional space, but an illusionary one, the figures do have to line up with vanishing points, though sometimes you can even adjust for this. Otherwise, I can move them around, or crop them freely, if within reason. But again, its not a chess board, and it's not stage direction. You don't want your picture to look like it's composed of paper dolls. If you really have to and it's of genuine benefit to the image, redraw the figure to fit the image! I know it's a bit of a backward approach, but this is, of course, only for when you're on your own agenda and time allows.

 So when I finish this piece in the next day or two, you'll see where this one ended up, just one of many figures that did a lot of moving around on the picture plane before I was satisfied, since the picture plane--a horizonless field of grass--gives me more flexibility than usual with perspective. 

Another Easter Girl

Here's another figure, this one inked, for my Easter egg hunt image in progress. I'm finding hair one of my favorite things to ink--drybrush is so perfect for hair--so I had fun drawing this little girls hair falling over her face. 

I joined an online writing workshop recently with a small group of excellent writers where I'm developing my adult science fiction short stories. It's a great experience, and I'm getting some great feedback, and I hope to try and get some of these suckers in print in the near future, perhaps under a pseudonym, if for no other reason than to distinguish them from my kid friendly material. The idea being, that if I happen to write a science fiction novel for adults, and someone is looking for more books by the guy who did Ladybug and Gentleman Beetle, it won't cause any confusion. Two of my favorite cartoonists use a similar strategy to distinguish their kid material from their adult material,  Renee French and Dave Cooper, but this may be a little over ambitious at this point for someone who has yet to have one book in print, let alone two under different names. Still, it's a fun notion to play with. I always liked the idea of having a pseudonym. 

Easter Hunt Kid

Pencils for a figure for a piece I'm doing about an Easter egg hunt. 

This is a side project, just to get a little more practice drawing kids. My neighbor, Ella who's six six years old, was kind enough to pose for this one. There's really nothing like a real kid to capture naturalistic kid-like gestures. There's only so much your imagination is going to allow you to do, and though I try not to render the photo, I do try to capture the gesture.

 Been getting some interesting non-children's book related offers lately, one of which might prove lucrative. More new on that, soon. 

Fox Box Inks

Preview of an inked drawing for part of an illustration I did for Red Fox Literary's first anniversary.

Cropping an Image

A

So recently I completed an image for my book in progress, Ladybug and Gentleman Beetle. I wasn't completely sure about it, and sometimes its good to have a second set of eyes, so my friend and fellow illustrator Kris Aro McLeod Had a few suggestions. For one, she thought the knot in the wood was a little distracting, So this was the first version:

I gave it some thought. I had fallen a little bit too in love with that tree, and I liked the knot, but she was right. I also thought that maybe it would be better to have the figures of the beetles larger in the frame, since, as an early reader book with smaller pages than a picture book, they would print very small otherwise. So as much as it pained me, I cropped in a little more, but I didn't want to lose those leaves, so I moved them in a little closer. And here's the result: 

Oh, the pain. All of that wonderful detail! But you have to do what you have to do to serve the image, so that nothing distracts too much from the focal point. 

So here's the full image. I usually give myself a little extra room on the edges just in case, but never quite this much room, because I didn't anticipate the crop. I work pretty hi-res, so it's not an issue to make the image larger, and everything was drawn considerably larger anyway.

So this was the original shape that I cropped into. It's simply a shape I painted in ink and darkened on photoshop.  With some photoshop magic, I was able to make the image conform to the shape. Maybe I'll describe that process in another post, but right now I have to put some ice on my back. I'll probably be better by monday!

New Ladybug and Gentleman Beetle Piece!

So here's the new piece, which leads into the other two posted in an earlier post:

I haven't been posting, or getting much done in general this week outside of writing, (which I've been doing quite a lot of) because I've been having trouble with my back. But not to worry! It happens about twice a year, and after a few trips to the chiropractor I'm  back in tip top shape! This image was completed last weekend, and I"ll be posting a more extensive blog entry about the whole project in the near future on the Red Fox Literary blog.

 While recuperating, I even wrote a new short story, my first attempt in a long while at an adult science fiction story! It's called, The Good Fight, about a war fought remotely from home, like a video game by soldiers who live with their parents. I don't know if I've ever had so much fun writing a short story, and as generally is the case, my science fiction inevitably turns out to be satire. I got a fair number of hits from my last short story post, Klesmer Vampires Steal Christmas (available for *free* in both text and audio form) but haven't gotten much reaction outside of a few close friends. So I'm glad to post these things, as long as someone out there is reading them. 

Why "In The Night Kitchen" Made Me Want to Make Books

In The Night Kitchen made me want to make books.

In fact, you may notice a little similarity between Mickey, here, and the little boy above, floating in his umbrella, and I would have to admit that this is probably no coincidence.

Lately I seem to be in the habit of writing about artists who have made an impact on me after they die, and I'm beginning to think that maybe I'm waiting just a little too long to say what they mean to me. One thing that surprises me in this particular instance, is how the death of Sendak doesn't sadden me at all. I can't claim to know his mind, but from recent interviews, it seemed like he was ready. He seemed content to  have had the opportunity to meet the people he grew to love in his life, and to have had the opportunity to write and illustrate books that he felt had meaning. He got to do most of what he set out to do. Not only did he write and illustrate books, but he designed theater sets and costumes for musicals and operas for both adults and children. Of course his life was not exactly without hardship. But I don't feel a loss. I know I'm supposed to, but I don't feel it, no matter how much affection I have for his books, or for the person that I imagined him to be.

In the Night Kitchen made me want to make books. I didn't say "Maurice Sendak made me want to write books," because he didn't. As far as I'm concerned, In the Night Kitchen is my book, not his. The fact of its author isn't what makes me love the book. When I discovered the book I had no idea--or care--about who Maurice Sendak was. I was curious about Doctor Seuss, and what kind of doctor he might be, but otherwise, the author of a book would have been easily forgotten trivia to that kid who loved In the Night Kitchen.

When I say "make books" I mean everything about a book. A book with a binding, and with pictures, and with stories inside. I remember having a copy of Where the Wild Things Are that was falling apart, and seeing the sewing of the binding, one piece of the mystery of how it was made. I was always fascinated by the mystery of things that were manufactured, and somewhere, by somebody, books were made. The first book I made that I can remember, was a book about Santa Claus, also a person of a great fascination to me. I  drew all the pictures on colored construction paper,and stapled it at the side. I must have figured out that this would leave one blank page before each picture, just like a picture book, so that's where the words would go. I couldn't write yet, so I dictated to my brother what words I wanted written on each page, and he wrote them.

It's one thing to have a book read to you, and another to truly experience it for yourself, by yourself, and I remember when this happened with In the Night Kitchen. I remember it was very early in the morning. I remember feeling that somehow the book knew me and what I felt and wanted. The author, as he should not be, was not my book. It was my book, and mine alone. I looked a lot like Mickey at that age. With no modesty whatsoever, I will admit  that I was an extraordinarily adorable child. I looked like Max, and I looked like Mickey, and so these books very much felt as if they were about me. In the Night kitchen was pure sensation. It was about the feeling of night, and about the feeling of milk, and about the feeling of dough and of flying, and of saying "Cock a doodle doo!" and I really don't care to try to figure out what it was about or means, because what it was really about was me, the kid, and how I felt and who I was.

Maurice Sendak died at 83. My Dad will be 88 in August. Maurice Sendak was an Ashkenazi Jew, second generation immigrant, and so was my dad. My dad's parents were socialists, and didn't practice, and as a secular and enthusiastic celebrator of Christmas and Easter, I didn't even know my dad was Jewish until I was about ten. My dad grew up in East Orange New Jersey, and as a teen, like Sendak, he lived in New York. he used to tell me stories about going to the movies for 25 cents, though my dad was more a fan of Flash Gordon serials than Mickey Mouse, the inspiration for Sendak's Mickey from In the Night Kitchen.


When my mother left my dad and took us from the small town where I grew up in Pennsylvania to California, more than anything, I missed my dad. I didn't have much connection to my mother, and my dad was my home. As I grew into my teens, I began to discover who Maurice Sendak was, and in my mind he became a connection to my dad and my childhood. Of course this man who made this book would be like my dad. I also discovered Sendak's other inspiration, Windsor McCay. McCay spoke to me as a teen as Sendak spoke to me as a little boy.  And sometime in my teens I decided I wanted to make comic books and picture books--and this was what In The Night Kitchen was--not just a picture book but a comic book, with word balloons and captions and a little boy who looked as much like me as he looked like McCay's Little Nemo.

As a teenager, I discovered Selma Lane's enormous book, The Art of Maurice Sendak, and hunted down every book I could find that Sendak had illustrated or written. I was surprised how few books he had actually written. The best of them: Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, The Nutshell Library, and The Sign on Rosie's Door. Some of my favorites that he illustrated: Grimm's Fairy Tales. The Griffon and the Minor Canon. Little Bear.  I loved that rich, engraving pen and ink style, and I remember working hard to try to emulate it.

Sendak's first book was by Ruth Krauss, A Hole is to Dig. Krauss and her husband, Crockett Johnson, served as mentors for Sendak, and as a 13 year old, while spending a very brief time in juvenile hall for a life changing but minor infraction, I discovered a rare paperback of Crocket Johnson's Barnaby on the book cart. It proved to be a great comfort and enduring favorite.

Maurice Sendak is a part of my family. Not the part that I was born into, but the part that I chose. I am a great believer and endorser of choosing your family if you ever have the option, and this, to me, includes people I may never meet and may never know who have gotten inside me and made a deep and indelible impression.

Now I'm 38, and I am so glad to be an adult, and I am so glad that I discovered In the Night Kitchen and so many other books by Sendak, and I'm so glad that now, I'm finally making picture books. So maybe it's selfish, but I can't say I'm sad at all that Maurice Sendak is dead. I'm glad that he was alive, and as far as I'm concerned, he still is. I haven't lost a thing. 

How to Motivate Yourself to Write

These suggestions are geared primarily towards fiction writing, but they can apply just as well to any form of writing. Some of these tips I've learned from others, and some are strategies I've learned through practice and trial and error. You may have heard many of these suggestions before in one form or another, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded, so here's one more reminder you might find helpful.

Always Stop Writing When You know What's About To Happen Next

You're on a roll. You're excited about what you're writing. You want to keep writing until you've gotten all you're ideas down. This may seem counter intuitive, but this is exactly when you should stop: midway, while you're still excited. Make notes of your ideas, and you'll find that excitement will continue to the next day, and if you continue this strategy you can sustain this excitement far beyond that initial inspiration.

When You're Not Writing, You're Thinking. This is Good


So you've stopped right in the middle of that inspiration. You've left yourself hanging, and you're bursting with ideas. But now you have time to ruminate over those ideas. Those ideas will serve as the seeds of other ideas, but they need time to grow. You may not even realize that you're thinking about them, but as soon as you get back to writing, you'll discover that that initial inspiration has turned into an even greater windfall. Like anything, this won't always happen, but it's more likely if you stop writing while you still have that seed.

Write Every Day

This is the most common suggestion that writer's make, but this is for good reason. Inspiration wains and you have no idea what to write, but the longer you put it off, the more you lose momentum. If you write a sentence, you're still writing. Even if you only only have the intention of writing that sentence, now you've gotten started, and starting is half the battle. You might end up writing something you know you'll get rid of later on, but it keeps the momentum going, and it makes it that much easier to start the next day.

 Keep yourself to a minimum word count, but keep your ambitions reasonable. What can you realistically write in a day, considering your other responsibilities and your pace? Keep your minimum at the lowest you can expect of yourself. When you exceed your minimum, it feels like you're really jamming, but when you write less, the times when you do write more should make it easier to forgive yourself when you don't. You're still on track. The high days of productivity make up for those low days.

Keep a Regular Schedule

Routine is key. I write every morning around the same time. I also stop writing around the same time. Maybe your time is the evening or the afternoon, but give yourself a general time line and target time. There's always time for writing. You're never too busy to meet your minimum, as long as your minimum is reasonable.

Allow Yourself Uncertainty

There are going to be times when you feel like you've screwed up, that you've ruined the whole thing and you need to start from scratch. This is healthy. Doubt means you're looking at your work with a critical eye. I usually find that I'm always walking a tightrope between feeling like I could screw everything up, and that maybe it's just working. The best answer to this, is to keep writing. Whether your practice is to chuck the bad writing after the first draft, or as you go, if you keep moving forward, inevitably you're going to write something you feel good about. I'm more of an excise as you go writer. I find that a certain amount of ruthless chopping in the early stages of a manuscript can be motivating, rather than discouraging. Don't get too ruthless--you can save that for the final draft. If there's a passage that you're unsure of but feel may have potential, put it in it's own file. You may never look at it again, or you may end up using it, or portions of it later, but putting it out of sight can help to reinforce your resolve.

Have the Resolve to Finish

There's no end to confidence you'll build by actually getting to the end of a manuscript. This doesn't mean you should never give up on a story, but only give up after you've developed the confidence that you can finish something if you're determined to. As you finish more projects, while at the same time, developing an increasingly rigorous editing process, you'll be well on your way to writing not only more frequently and more confidently but more effectively. Writers need to write, and you have to get a ton of bad writing out of your system before you can write well. Even if you're a very attentive reader and have read widely, the exercise of writing and writing regularly is extremely important.

Should I Make an Outline?


This, again, is a question of personal approach, but I don't tend to. Outlines tends to reduce a character's actions to plot points. If you're going for a character driven story, you may end up having your character artificially adhere to these plot points in a way that is contrary to what the character has become. Of course there is always a risk of taking too many digressions, or going off on tangents, but this is something that I think can be taken care of in the editing process. The other problem with an outline is that you deny yourself the discovery that comes with the writing process, of discovering a new twist or turn in the story that you could have never anticipated. Not that you shouldn't write with a plan, but if you have too much of a preconceived idea of where the story is going next, you may end up feeling like your writing by the numbers, executing the next scene in your outline as prescribed, denying yourself the excitement of that next eureka. This, to me, is what keeps writing engaging and current. I also believe it's what makes the reader want to turn the page. If you're not sure what happens next, neither are they. But avoid writing yourself into a corner--not knowing everything isn't the same as not having options. This falls nicely into the idea of knowing what's going to happen next before your next writing session.

Should I Keep a Blog?

I only write in my blog after I've accomplished my other writing for the day. It's great practice to write a blog, to write anything on a regular basis, but if you're a fiction writer and your blog doesn't contain fiction, the blog could prove to be a distraction. Opinion or autobiography requires a different skill set than fiction, and though any writing can be helpful, you've got to be writing in the mode of your chosen discipline if you want to get better.

Thanks for reading, and happy writing!