I went to a birthday party for the Coyote’s mom who turned 97! She was a famous beauty (literally) in the 20th century and she also was known for drawing little mousies, so I tried to draw this bombshell mouse in her style. Big hair, little red dress, and a champagne toast
I’m partially satisfied with my success. It was a busy week and I didn’t feel well and it was left to the last minute and I guess I fell asleep before i finished and had to color it in the car on the way to Phoenix. So possibly could have been better. But she loved it. I also gave her a snowflake, one of the best ones I’ve cut since my snowflake workshop.
I gave the rest of the snowflakes to the librarian.
One of the GATE teachers liked my owl bulletin board so much she gave me a book called October, October by Katya Balen, which prominently features an owl, although that owl is a baby barn owl and my original owl was an adult great horned owl (inspired by a juvenile great horned owl). I wanted to make her a little owl card but baby barn owls are kind of ugly so I drew an adult.
Usually, things come together for me. Occasionally they don’t. Sometimes I give up.
i spent 2 days trying to make nephling number 3 a 3-dimensional card with an electric guitar with real strings but I couldn’t find a satisfactory way to attach the strings and after the 7th time they fell out I gave up and drew a 2-dimensional electric guitar, which I am also not happy with. But camp is only 2 weeks long and if I didn’t actually mail them something they wouldn’t actually receive it.
So this is something I made that never aligned with my vision and I had to just accept it as it was and call it finished. And that was the whole “giving up on perfection” part of my artistic process that allowed me to create all the stuff in this blog. Sometimes you have to call it “done” or “good enough” even if you don’t feel like it is.
I started a big (like 2′ x 4′) painting but it will probably be some time before that’s finished. I’m working on a nonfiction book, a sort of biography about the Coyote’s life. It’s a very interesting life. I mostly know the whole story by heart because GOLLY does that guy like to talk and if he can’t think of something new to say he just returns to his greatest hits. Fortunately, it’s a very interesting life. Most of the book is about the parts I was in, but he was 55 already when I met him.
There’s this other thing I want to share here, about my relationship to art, but perhaps that’s another post.
Whew! That’s a wrap on the black and white pages. I still have the colored pages (front and back cover, inside and outside) to finish, but they’re well underway. Hopefully by the time you see this, they’ll be done as well.
“The Spider from the Darkness” is the story I wrote to replace the second Lorena story, meaning I wrote it well after I wrote the others. However, it was the first page I finished when I started illustrating the comic. I love the water lily and the heart and the spider and the semi-feral girl and the butterflies and even that silly asymmetrical sun, which shouldn’t work, but somehow does.
If all goes well, I hope this comic will be available in print at some point in the near future, and, if possible, I hope I’ll be able to bring it to some nice conference–ALA’s 2026 gathering in Chicago would be my preference–where I can discuss it with other Bonnie Jo Campbell scholars and perhaps entice new readers to The Waters.
If you are among the chosen few who read my unpublished novel The Girl Who Followed Her Own Counsel you might see some parallels between this story and one of the Little Red Riding Hood variants in that novel. The point is: either you grow up or you die. There’s no option where you stay a kid forever no matter what your family does to keep you there. If you keep living, you’re always going to become an adult, and, sad as it is, your grandparents are always going to decline as you rise.
I had what one might call a prolonged childhood, by choice, in which I was able to keep a youthful outlook on everything until I was about 35. Adulthood never really suited me, though, and I’m happy to move on to my crone phase. I’m happy to be a witch. I was never cut out to be a grown up.
Perhaps not coincidentally, my grandmother lived to 96 and only passed away about a year ago, when I was 49. Now I’m grandmother-aged myself. You can’t stop the progression of time. You can’t stop your children from growing up.
The Spirit of the Waters is probably my favorite thing I drew for this comic, which is why she’s going to be a full color feature of the Table of Contents and probably, at some point in the future after this comic is put to bed and after my literary journal release party and hopefully after getting out of jury duty, I hope to make it a sticker. There’s a few images in this comic that would make good stickers.
I’m not confident about a lot but I am confident that this is the best drawing of a knight in shining armor doing battle with an octopus that you are going to see today. I worked really hard on it.
This is the story that’s probably going to do the least for a reader who hasn’t actually read the book, and required the most careful note taking on my part, so I could really get a sense of each of the six “knights” and what they specifically had to be sorry about.
Also, tiny mermaid boobs, tee hee. Always gotta have at least one naked body part in each of these comic books to ensure that I can’t show them to my elementary students.
It was such a big, white space! This one gave me a lot of trouble too, mostly because I needed to fill it up. I drew a bunch of different flowers that I hated and never finished before I got inspired to do these giant stylized dandelion puffs, which are excellent and magical.
Sweet Lorena is probably the most blameless character in the book, even though she certainly has to suffer through the nonsense everyone else creates. The story puts some distance between her and the reader, while marveling at what a standup person she is.
As mentioned previously, I wrote most of these stories in a kind of fugue state, which led to me writing Lorena’s story twice because I forgot I had already written it. I ended up discarding the second one, in which she is characterized as “the strong girl” but has to go through basically this same nonsense. (Rose is a siren in that one.)
After I drew this image, I felt like it wasn’t quite done and then I realized it needed a squirrel laughing at the prince in the tree, so I added that.
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