Diary of the Black Widow

Diary of the Black Widow is book I'm still very proud of. It was my first book and it was a milestone for me. Up to that point I had great difficulty sticking with a project. Having previously done short stories for the Undercoverfish Anthology helped me to focus on seeing something through start to finish. So, by the time Black Widow was accepted by Alterna I was able to complete it.

It probably helped too that the original distribution was in 24 page comic book format. So having it broken down into three issues helped make the project seem a bit monumental.

And there's something to be said about working with a deadline.

I realize six or seven years later reading my afterword I might have given people the wrong impression about how I felt about my work. Especially the line I wrote on feeling some of the pages "wasn't my best work" and the impression that might give people reading my book.

Actually what I was thinking and what wrote down were are completely different. But it goes back to what I was taking about yesterday how if you give the impression you don't care about your work how are you going to get other people excited about your work?

The truth is I'll always be hypercritical of my own work and I will forever be looking at what I published and thinking "what I could have done better".

That was half my problem with previous projects and why I never completed one because I was constantly reworking pages to death. And if I were to go with the logic that I should wait until at least I thinks my work is good before inflicting it on innocent readers then I would never get anything published.

I'd just be miserable toad ridiculing other people's artwork in my blog.

My goal was to get a book published. And it's not going to happen by just sitting around and waiting. And it would never get done if I kept on working and reworking those pages.

The second part of this story is there was a lot going on in my life at that time. My Grandmother passed away the year before and my Grandfather was dying at the time I started working on those pages. My teaching schedule was flexible enough at the time to stop by during the day and look over him if he needed anything. While was doing that I worked on the pages at the kitchen table.

It was the same kitchen table I had done a great deal of artwork on as a kid. And while I was working on the last few pages of issue one realized that this would be the last time drew anything at that table at that house. A couple weeks after I completed the pages and sent them out to be lettered my Grandfather had died.

So I submitted those pages. Imperfections and all. Because that was the last artwork I would ever do at my Grandparents house. Within a year or so the house was sold and I would never step foot in it again.

My decision was not a refusal to put in extra effort but those pages represented a very special moment in time for me.

What having Diary of the Black Widow published did for me is gave me the confidence to go forth publishing five more books over the past six years following it's release. I don't care if I'm famous or not. I got to get the story I wanted to tell published.

Don't get me wrong. You want people to enjoy your work and you want to make a living doing what you love. But never make fame an fortune your driving goal. The streets are littered with the casualties of people who made fame more important than anything else.

All in all, Diary of the Black Widow was a starting point. It gave me motivation to get my work out there and do more shows to promote myself. So out of all the books I've had published I'll always have a soft spot for it because it was my first.

Oh, and a word of friendly advice to all you would be critics out there.If you can't tell the difference between amateurish pencil drawings and pen and ink, maybe you should think twice about being an art critic.