My early years were spent living in Manhattan. New York, for anyone who has never visited, is a city to be seen on foot. You can walk everywhere; there is always something or someone to see.
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Bruce Lee’s career was short. Six films. He died suddenly at age 32, on the cusp of international stardom. And yet, Bruce Lee lives on, as engaging today and he was in the 60s and 70s. Why? His charisma.
During my crowdfunding campaign there have been peaks and valleys, days of fruitful contributions and days when I wondered where all the YA fans had gone. What looks initially like rejection or indifference, we discover is simply a sign that busy people are attending to the events of their day-to-day lives.
I have seen and heard many people ask how they can get rid of writer’s block. Anyone who offers a definitive answer to that question is, in my opinion, the equivalent of a snake oil salesman, someone selling you a product to cure your ills that doesn’t work.
I remember when I was a young teenager saying to a professional illustrator I met, “You have my dream job, you get to draw all day long.”
Some artists or writers include a broad range of genres in their portfolio – science fiction, fantasy, abstract work, animation rotations, comic book work and landscape art. This sheer variety of genres will cause an art director or editor to pause. They respond to some portfolio they are reviewing, or a manuscript with, “I don’t know what he does. I don’t get it.” Or, “She doesn’t know her own voice yet.”
Sequential art, like jazz, is a language which expresses ideas and stir emotions. To communicate, comic books use shapes, symbols, signs and pictures – as well as the letters of the alphabet.
What goes into a good composition? I could wax poetic about how the golden ratio has been used for centuries to create dynamic compositions; or about balancing the sizes of your objects, or where to place your horizon line. But there are more than enough authors and teachers online that do a better job than I ever could. The same goes for how to structure a written composition.
I am not a fan of formula writing. I don’t like neat little bows tied at the end of stories, or stories where I can guess every reveal before the actual reveal.
When our daughter was born, some twenty years ago, she was placed in my arms and I began to float on air. I had the same experience almost six years later when our son was born. But that’s another story. It was my daughter’s very early childhood that led to the creation of Maggie MacCormack and the Witches’ Wheel.
After our daughter was born, I couldn’t wait to get home from work each day to spend as much time with her as I could. And in the still of the night, with my daughter snuggled into me, I would think of all the things I would share with her while she was growing. I imagined reading Where the Wild Things Are to her, and The Secret Garden, Narnia and Lord of the Rings. And so I did.