I didn’t post on Friday. Why? Because I was having a crisis of purpose. Then it hit me, I don’t need to compromise, do I? You see, my goal, since elementary school, was to be an illustrator. My best friend, Paige, was committed to becoming a writer, and because we did everything together in first grade, including sharing a boyfriend, Dean Newton, I decided I would be a book illustrator.
That changed by the time college rolled around. I decided I was going to be a scientific illustrator. The first in my family to go to college, I did not know a lot about choosing schools based on the programs they offered. In fact, I thought any college would provide me with the skills I would need for my chosen profession, thus I ended up a rhetoric major. Yeah. That’s another blog post unto itself, but no regrets!
I tried to cobble together a program that would lead to scientific illustration, but alas, I justified rhetoric as the thing that could be morphed into anything I wanted, and it kind of is.
Now, almost 30 years later, I’m a writer, but I have always felt like something was missing. Sure, I kept up with the art. I returned to college a half-dozen years ago to complete a program in graphic design, toward building my own book covers, book formatting, and all things book-related. It was only recently that my mother encouraged me to take some of the illustrations I had created 30 years ago for a children’s book and “do something with them.”
Sadly, I do not own the copyright to the book to which those illustrations belong, but what the whoo? I write books all the time, every day, so why not start illustrating those?
It was clearly a severed human finger.
Small towns are filled with surprises. There are characters – eccentrics bordering on madness, gossips, keepers of the peace, but there is always a skeleton or two hidden in a closet… or in this case, a small jewelry store box from a store I had been warned harbored evil.” – from my w-i-p, DEATH OF A SERIAL HUSBAND.
Well, I’m just not sure, so I put it to you here. Would you read an illustrated, adult, cozy mystery?
Just to be clear, here’s one of the illustrations I’ve completed in the past week. It’s dark. There wouldn’t be a lot of illustrations, no more than one or two per chapter, but can I do that? Maybe that’s my problem. I’ve been waiting for permission to do a thing, and I just need to… do it. Stay tuned.
