#i do not know this author or illustrator | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fenimores-book-nook · 6 months

Text

My future??

This topic is something that I have spent a loooooot of time thinking about. More like OVERthinking. The reason being is simply because I don't know. I don't know what my future holds, I don't know what I want it to hold. And, like, I'm only nineteen, so I got plenty of time. Heck, I got loads. Some people don't figure out what they really want to do until their thirties. In Friends, they are all quite literally figuring out life and they're all in their twenty-thirties. New Girl, it's the same situation. One thing I really don't appreciate is how much pressure is put on high schoolers and college age people to figure out what they want to do for the rest of their lives. How are you supposed to know that when you've barely lived your life? Also, how do you know you want to do one thing for the rest of your life?

I made the decision to not go to college after high school which was a great decision for me. I don't know what I want to do so why would I waste thousands of dollars on classes I don't even really want to take? I'm not bashing on people who do go to college or are happy doing one thing for most of their life, that's great that it works for them. I just don't like how college is almost expected of you now. It shouldn't be. College is NOT for everyone. And people who decide not to go aren't less successful, we just do things differently.

I don't know if I'll ever go back to school but if I end up wanting to, the option is there.

I only know a few things for sure:

I don't want to end up doing only one thing.

I want to do something creative.

I want writing to be a part of it.

My photo from a Jesus date I had a while back. <3

Writing has always been a part of my life and a big part too, so of course I'd want to spend a good chunk of my time doing that. Even if it isn't the main thing I do. And even if this is the writing I'll keep doing the most, I'd be okay with that.

The two careers I've been interested in the most is an author, obviously, and a fashion designer/illustrator. During my Junior/Senior year of high school, I really got interested in fashion. It was my dream for a while to attend FIT: Fashion Institute of Technology. One, because it was in New York City (I've wanted to go there for forever) and two, because, I mean, it's FIT. The photos and websites I looked at made it look so glamorous. I'm sure it is, but I'm also sure it's incredibly stressful at times. (like how college is) Plus, I still wasn't 100% sure that it was what I wanted to do. And I didn't have the money for it, AND New York is a ways from where I live; good ol' Kansas.

Still on the fashion career topic, the other night, I thought that maybe I got a sort of sign about my career choices. It might be a stretch, but I read into these things, sometimes too much. My mom and I were watching A Christmas Kiss II, where the main character is a fashion designer. Afterwards, we started another movie, The Winter Palace, where the main character is an author. Fashion designer. Author. I didn't even realize until later the next day. My brain is like freaking out over here: does this mean something??? What do I do now?????

*found on pinterest (yes, yes I do love pinterest, thank you for asking)

So, that's always fun.

I'm not sure if I would want to do the entire fashion design thing, or just do fashion illustration. Design is more creating the product, where illustration focuses more on making a visual of it. I like the illustration aspect of it because it's not only sketching out the vision you have for an outfit/piece of clothing, but it's putting the mood and color of it in play too. I don't know if I'd want to do all of the sewing and hand work, I'm not the best at sewing. I usually stick to fixing rips with hand-sewing. But, I could get better at it if I tried. ;)

When I told my sister about this "sign" of mine, she suggested I could follow both paths and see which one really takes off. For an author, I don't really need more schooling. But for the fashion side, I would most likely need to. Still, I don't have to decide right now. Heck, if I wanted to, I could keep writing and drawing up little sketches and put them to use in a more non-traditional way. I'm sure I could come up with something.

Maybe I'll include some sketches or pieces I've written on here at some point. :) But for now, there's my spiel for not knowing my future. But hey, that's alright.

jusqu'à la prochaine fois,

Thalia <3

#future #i don't know what i'm doing but that's fine #writing #fashion #fashtion illustration #fashion design #author #journaling #pinterest

0 notes

copperbadge · 2 months

Text

I'm getting depressingly good at identifying the formula for Pop Academic Books About ADHD.

Regardless of their philosophy it pretty much goes like this:

1. Emotionally sensitive essay about the struggle of ADHD and the author's personal experience with it as both a person with ADHD and a healthcare professional.

2. Either during or directly following this, a lightly explicated catalogue of symptoms, illustrated by anecdotes from patient case studies. Optional: frequent, heavy use of metaphor to explain ADHD-driven behavior.

3. Several chapters follow, each dedicated to a symptom; these have a mini-formula of their own. They open with a patient case study, discuss the highly relatable aspects of the specific symptom or behavior, then offer some lightweight examples of a treatment for the symptom, usually accompanied by follow up results from the earlier case studies.

4. Somewhere around halfway-to-two-thirds through the book, the author introduces the more in-depth explication of the treatment system (often their own homebrew) they are advocating. These are generally both personally-driven (as opposed to suggested cultural changes, which makes sense given these books' target audience, more on this later) and composed of an elaborate system of either behavior alteration or mental reframing. Whether this system is actually implementable by the average reader varies wildly.

5. A brief optional section on how to make use of ADHD as a tool (usually referring to ADHD or some of its symptoms as a superpower at least once). Sometimes this section restates the importance of using the systems from part 4 to harness that superpower. Frequently, if present, it feels like an afterthought.

6. Summation and list of further resources, often including other books which follow this formula.

I know I'm being a little sarcastic, but realistically there's nothing inherently wrong about the formula, like in itself it's not a red flag. It's just hilariously recognizable once you've noticed it.

It makes sense that these books advocate for the Reader With ADHD undertaking personal responsibility for their treatment, since these are in the tradition of self-help publishing. They're aimed at people who are already interested in doing their own research on their disability and possible ways to handle it. It's not really fair to ask them to be policy manuals, but I do find it interesting that even books which advocate stuff like volunteering (for whatever reason, usually to do with socialization issues and isolation, often DBT-adjacent) never suggest disability activism either generally or with an ADHD-specific bent.

None of these books suggest that perhaps life with ADHD could be made easier with increased accommodations or ease of medication access, and that it might be in a person's best interest to engage in political advocacy surrounding these and other disability-related issues. Or that activism related to ADHD might help to give someone with ADHD a stronger sense of ownership of their unique neurology. Or that if you have ADHD the idea of activism or even medical self-advocacy is crushingly stressful, and ways that stress might be dealt with.

It does make me want to write one of my own. "The Deviant Chaos Guide To Being A Miscreant With ADHD". Includes chapters on how to get an actual accurate assessment, tips for managing a prescription for a controlled substance, medical and psychiatric self-advocacy for people who are conditioned against confrontation, When To Lie About Being Neurodivergent, policy suggestions for ADHD-related legislation, tips for activism while executively dysfunked, and to close the book a biting satire of the pop media idea of self-care. ("Feeling sad? Make yourself a nice pot of chicken soup from scratch and you'll feel better in no time. Stay tuned after this rambling personal essay for the most mediocre chicken soup recipe you've ever seen!" "Have you considered planning and executing an overly elaborate criminal heist as a way to meet people and stay busy?")

Every case study or personal anecdote in the book will have a different name and demographics attached but will also make it obvious that they are all really just me, in the prose equivalent of a cheap wig, writing about my life. "Kelly, age seven, says she struggles to stay organized using the systems neurotypical children might find easy. I had to design my own accounting spreadsheet in order to make sure I always have enough in checking to cover the mortgage, she told me, fidgeting with the pop socket on her smartphone."

I feel a little bad making fun, because these books are often the best resource people can get (in itself concerning). It's like how despite my dislike of AA, I don't dunk on it in public because I don't want to offer people an excuse not to seek help. It feels like punching down to criticize these books, even though it's a swing at an industry that is mainly, it seems, here to profit from me. But one does get tired of skimming the hype for the real content only to find the real content isn't that useful either.

Les (not his real name) was diagnosed at the age of 236. Charming, well-read, and wealthy, he still spent much of his afterlife feeling deeply inadequate about his perceived shortcomings. "Vampire culture doesn't really acknowledge ADHD as a condition," he says. "My sire wouldn't understand, even though he probably has it as well. You should see the number of coffins containing the soil of his homeland that he's left lying forgotten all over Europe." A late diagnosis validated his feelings of difference, but on its own can't help when he hyperfocuses on seducing mortals who cross his path and forgets to get home before sunrise. "I have stock in sunburn gel companies," he jokes.

#sam has adhd #self help #satire

6K notes · View notes

soberscientistlife · 7 months

Text

It occurred to Pooh and Piglet that they hadn't heard from Eeyore for several days, so they put on their hats and coats and trotted across the Hundred Acre Wood to Eeyore's house. Inside the house was Eeyore.

"Hello Eeyore," said Pooh.

"Hello Pooh. Hello Piglet" said Eeyore, in a Glum sounding voice.

"We just thought we'd check on you," said Piglet, "because we hadn't heard from you, and so we wanted to know if you were okay."

Eeyore was silent for a moment. "Am I okay?" he asked, eventually. "Well, I don't know, to be honest. Are any of us really okay? That's what I ask myself. All I can tell you, Pooh and Piglet, is that right now I feel really rather Sad, and Alone, and Not Much Fun To Be Around At All.

Which is why I haven't bothered you. Because you wouldn't want to waste your time hanging out with someone who is Sad, and Alone, and Not Much Fun To Be Around At All, would you now."

Pooh looked at Piglet, and Piglet looked at Pooh, and they both sat down, one on either side of Eeyore in his stick house.

Eeyore looked at them in surprise. "What are you doing?"

"We're sitting here with you," said Pooh, "because we are your friends. And true friends don't care if someone is feeling Sad, or Alone, or Not Much Fun To Be Around At All. True friends are there for you anyway. And so here we are."

"Oh," said Eeyore. "Oh." And the three of them sat there in silence, and while Pooh and Piglet said nothing at all; somehow, almost imperceptibly, Eeyore started to feel a very tiny little bit better. Because Pooh and Piglet were There. No more; no less.

Author - AA Milne Illustration - EH Shepard

My favorite Pooh story.

7K notes · View notes

taylor-titmouse · 2 months

Text

hey i want to talk about how you should be promoting your work as an erotic author/illustrator

i'm writing this up because the marketing aspect of my work as an erotic author/illustrator is a science to me, and also because i'm the guy who gets unreasonably annoyed when i see other creators not properly advertising their work. you presumably want to make money off your work. this post will be written under the assumption you want to make money off your work but are doing a bad job at it. it will be very confrontational. if you read this and feel attacked you're right and i am attacking you.

this is geared toward selling erotic comics/writing/books/art as products. i will probably write more than one post about this subject so if i didn't touch on something you want to know more about, comment/send me an ask and i'll keep it in mind for the next one.

i will start with my first and least specific but most important point:

DON'T GET FUCKING CUTE

hi are you paying attention. i'm gripping you by the sides of your face. do not get fucking cute with what you are trying to sell. you are not a big enough property to get cute, nobody LIKES it when big properties get cute, and you are selling porn. you have to own this. you have to be up front about this. don't be tongue in cheek, don't be all teehee i wonder what this could be~, don't be secretive. you are selling a product. you have to fucking act like it. you are an adult selling pornography to other adults. i am GRIPPING your HEAD you NEED to understand this.

and to be clear when i say 'cute' i mean coy. i don't mean cutesy, as in the aesthetic. you can be as hello kitty pastel ten emojis a post uwu as you like when you're building your audience and generating hype. but when you start trying to sell, don't be vague, don't be sarcastic, don't mislabel your work as a joke and assume everyone is on it. because they're not.

you must always assume 75% of the people seeing the thing you are advertising have no fucking idea who you are. and that includes a huge chunk of the people who already follow you. they do not know who you are or what you've been working on for two months or why they should care about it. they just got here. somebody just reposted it. they are seeing it for the first time. most people are only looking at social media for a tiny chunk of their day. they are not keeping up with you. you cannot get cute about what you are trying to sell because nobody knows what it is until you tell them.

okay are you still with me. we are going to talk about clarity now.

YOU GOTTA TELL ME WHAT IT IS

good lord the amount of times i have gone to buy somebody's comic or book and had no idea what's actually in it or what it's about. who are the characters? why should i care about them? what do they do in it? what is the premise of this thing you want me to spend $5 on? why would you not tell me? i'm shaking you again. please i have to know what i'm buying i only have so much money to spend on porn.

porn, arguably more than any other genre, relies on knowing exactly what is in it. you do not want to surprise your readers with a kink they were unaware of! and on the flip side, you do not want to miss out on your target audience! if your book contains a hot spider babe laying eggs in an elf, you have to say so. not just so people who don't want to read about eggs know it isn't for them, but so the people who are egg crazy can see that and go "oh fuck YES i love EGGS here is my $5 and an extra $2 tip for catering to me specifically". a contents/features list is as much an advertisement as it is a warning!

as for re: who the characters are and why should i care, i'm sorry but you need to learn how to write sales copy. you have to write blurbs. you have to get good at the shit that goes on the back of a book. we all hate it but we have to do it. i want to know who the characters are and what the context is. i, personally, am not interested in contemporary stories as much as fantasy and historical. please tell me what genre this porn exists in so i know if it aesthetically appeals to me. pull some books off your shelves and see how they do it. hell man go look at mine.

while you're there, note that every single book of mine has a sample of what's in it. this feels like such a no-brainer to me but again! the amount of times i have gone to buy somebody's work and they don't show me what their work looks like! you gotta give me the first page or two! just enough that i know if i like the way your writing sounds, or the way you draw your comics! i don't know you! i am not going to trust that you're good at what you do just based on a cover. the cover is to get me to this step, it is not the only step. you have to show me that you're worth spending my money on!

to put it less cynically, you want to catch my interest. you want me to go 'oh i want to see more of this', you want me to go 'ahh i want to know where this goes!' you need to get me invested and craving more. earn my $5!!!

YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT EASY TO GIVE YOU MONEY

hey go look at your bio right now. go look at your pinned post. do you have a link to your patreon there? do you have a link to your itchio/gumroad/whatever? do i have to click more than once to get to the places you want me to go to give you money? why? why are you making me click twice? have we learned nothing from every website making you click an extra time when they make some stupid UI update and how much it pisses us off? i have already given up, i have forgotten you, i am not giving you my $5 today. put your links in the easiest places to get to them.

god literally as i was writing this post i went to go find somebody's itchio to see how they described their work and it was not anywhere on their profile. grabbing you and shaking you PUT THE LINK WHERE I CAN FIND IT. don't make it hard! make it easy! i am a dickhead sitting on the toilet scrolling, saw your post, and was interested enough to read further. but you made me go to your bio to find your linktree and oops i have already gone back to my timeline to look at the boobies in the next post. stop wasting precious bio space on DNIs and put your fuckin links there!!!

this is more for the twitter people, but: just put the link in the damn post. just say the word commission. just say it's for patreon. "wuh wuh the algorithm" it is not the damn algorithm it's that everybody hates advertising and nobody wants to retweet ads. putting slashes in the words doesn't do anything and you look like a fool. i have posted so much art that says it's 'a commission for ___" and it did exactly as good as any other art despite having the word commission in it. and by doing the slashes you just made it impossible for anybody to search your account for your commission information (which should be at the VERY LEAST in a post under your pinned tweet if you're not actively posting about them being open).

okay that went on a tangent i'm going to back to the point of putting the link in the tweet. put it in the first post. not in the first reply. don't tell them to go to your bio. put it in the post people are actually going to share. it's fine to put more information in the thread but people are only ever going to share the first post. so put the link there. you have to make it easy. putting links in tweets can hurt you algorithmically, even in the replies. so you're better off having it in the post that actually gets seen and shared. i don't want to open the tweet and scroll to get to your sales page where i ASSUME you will have put all the information anyway. put it in the tweet that just got retweeted by itself onto my dash!

also you have to share it a ton of times. i repost my shit every few hours when i'm trying to push a new product. as i said before people are not 24/7 looking at their timelines. they missed it the first time. they missed it the second time. they didn't get paid yet that week but they were after the eighth time and you reminded them again so they finally bought it. that i will still get sales every time i repost a book ad weeks after release says there are always people who missed it, or who only just showed up.

abandon your pride and shill. shills pay their bills. anyone who gets annoyed about it isn't giving you money in the first place. don't worry about looking like a sell out. don't apologize for plugging your own work. post about it often, post about it in different ways. post about it. post about it. you are not going to make money if people don't know you have something to sell them. if you want to make a career out of it, you need to act like it.

I DON'T HAVE A FOURTH POINT

kisses your forehead. i'm sorry for yelling at you. i've been making and publishing and selling adult art for the past two-three years and have got myself to the point where it pays my rent, and i got there by paying attention to what does and does not work.

please do your best to make money. i want you to make money.

as i said above i plan to write more posts on this subject, such as cover design, how to actually write sales copy, and best practices with running a patreon, but if there's things you would want to hear more about leave a comment or send an ask! i will probably be less aggressive on future topics. these are just things that have grinded my gears for a grip.

#tt talks writing #tt talks drawing

3K notes · View notes

homunculus-argument · 3 months

Text

Reading Really Old Books has given me another angle of perspective to why "show, don't tell" is so important: you can always tell what you can see, even if you can't know for sure what you're looking at. It helps mend the gap, both intentionally when you're not 100% sure of what you're talking about, and as an insurance just in case readers of the future might know more about it than you currently do.

If a book from the 1800s just dismissively says "his previously so strong-willed wife developed hysteria after the incident", I'm going to roll my eyes and dismiss this right back. But if the same incident is illustrated by describing the way she becomes frightened and starts shaking at the sight of something only marginally related to the tramatising incident, I can draw my own conclusions and go "oh, she's triggered by the sight of horse reins. The reins remind her of the Someone Got Stomped To Death By A Horse -incident, and she is triggered by the sight of them. This woman has PTSD." And I'll have more respect for the author, who clearly looked at whatever he saw in the enviroment of his time, instead of dismissively assuming that he knew what he was looking at, and trusting that the readers would do the same.

The concept of ADHD wasn't known during the time when William Stearns Davis wrote his book A Friend of Caesar. And had he known a term for it, he may not have used it. But in the way he wrote the book, you can see that Davis had read multiple accounts of the kind of shit that Julius Caesar apparently did in his life. And wrote the man who had died centuries before the author was born having The Symptoms exactly the same way as I do whenever I'm unmedicated.

3K notes · View notes

maniculum · 7 months

Text

Medieval Scorpions Effortpost

So yesterday I reblogged this post featuring an 11th-century depiction of the Apocalypse Locusts from Revelations, noting the following incongruity as another medieval scorpion issue:

The artist, as you can see, has interpreted "tails like scorpions" as meaning "glue cheerful-looking snakes to their butts".

Anyway, it occurred to me that the medieval scorpion thing might not be as widely known as I think it is, and that Tumblr would probably enjoy knowing about it if it isn't known already. So, finding myself unable to focus on the research I'm supposed to be doing, I decided to write about this instead. I'll just go ahead and put a cut here.

As we can see in the image above, at least one artist out there thought a "scorpion" was a type of snake. Which makes it difficult to draw "tails like scorpions", because a snake's tail is not that distinctive or menacing (maybe rattlesnakes, but they don't have those outside the Americas). So they interpreted "tails like scorpions" as "the tail looks like a whole snake complete with head".

Let me tell you. This is not a problem unique to this illustration.

See, people throughout medieval Europe were aware of scorpions. As just alluded to, they are mentioned in the Bible, and if the people producing manuscripts in medieval Europe knew one thing, it was Stuff In Bible. They're also in the Zodiac, which medieval Europe had inherited through classical sources. However, let's take a look at this map:

That's Wikipedia's map of the native range of the Scorpiones order, i.e., all scorpion species. You may notice something -- the range just stops at a certain northern latitude. Pretty much all of northern Europe is scorpion-free. If you lived in the north half of Europe, odds were good you had never seen a scorpion in your life. But if you were literate or educated at all, or you knew they were a thing, because you'd almost certainly run across them being mentioned in texts from farther south. And those texts wouldn't bother to explain what a scorpion was, of course -- everyone knows scorpions, right? When was the last time you stopped to explain What Is Spiders?

So medieval writers and artists in northern Europe were kind of stuck. There was all this scorpion imagery and metaphor in the texts they liked to work from, but they didn't really know what a scorpion was. Writers could kind of work around it (there's a lot of "oh, it's a venomous creature, moving on"), but sometimes they felt the need to break it down better. For this, of course, they'd have to refer to a bestiary -- but due to Bestiary Telephone and the persistent need of bestiary authors to turn animals into allegories, one of the only visual details you got on scorpions was that they... had a beautiful face, which they used to distract people in order to sting them.

And look. I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum, but I would say that a scorpion's face has significant aesthetic appeal only for a fairly small segment of the population. I'm sure you could get an entomologist to rhapsodize about it a bit, but your average person on the street will not be entranced by the face of a scorpion. So this did not help the medieval Europeans in figuring out how to depict scorpions. There was also some semantic confusion -- see, in some languages (such as Old and Middle English), "worm" could be a general term for very small animals of any kind. But it also could mean "serpent".* So there were some, like our artist at the top of the post, who were pretty sure a scorpion was a snake. This was probably helped along by the fact that "venomous" was one of the only things everyone knew about them, and hey, snakes are venomous. Also, Pliny the Elder had floated the idea that there were scorpions in Africa that could fly, and at least one author (13th-century monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus) therefore suggested that they had feathers. I don't see that last one coming up much, I just share it because it's funny to me.

*English eventually resolved this by borrowing the Latin vermin for very small animals, using the specialized spelling wyrm for big impressive mythical-type serpents, and sticking with the more specific snake for normal serpents.

Some authors, like the anonymous author of the Ancrene Wisse, therefore suggested that a scorpion was a snake with a woman's face and a stinging tail. (Everyone seemed to be on the same page with regards to the fact that the sting was in the tail, which is in fact probably the most recognizable aspect of scorpions, so good job there.) However, while authors could avoid this problem, visual artists could not. And if you were illustrating a bestiary or a calendar, including a scorpion was not optional. So they had to take a shot at what this thing looked like.

And so, after this way-too-long explanation, the thing you're probably here for: inaccurate medieval drawings of scorpions. (There are of course accurate medieval drawings of scorpions, from artists who lived in the southern part of Europe and/or visited places where scorpions lived; I'm just not showing you those.) And if you find yourself wondering, "how sure are you that that's meant to be a scorpion?" -- all of these are either from bestiaries or from calendars that include zodiac illustrations.

11th-century England, MS Arundel 60. (Be honest, without the rest of this post, if I had asked you to guess what animal this was supposed to be, would you have ever guessed “scorpion”?)

12th-century Germany, "Psalter of Henry the Lion". (Looks a bit undercooked. Kind of fetal.)

12th-century France, Peter Lombard's Sententiae. (Very colorful, itsy bitsy claws, what is happening with that tail?)

12th-century England, "The Shaftesbury Psalter". (So a scorpion is some sort of wyvern with a face like a duck, correct?)

13th-century France, Thomas de Cantimpré's Liber de natura rerum. (I’d give them credit for the silhouette not being that far off, but there’s a certain bestiary style where all the animals kind of look like that. Also note how few of these have claws.)

13th-century England, "The Bodley Bestiary". (Mischievous flying squirrel impales local man’s hand, local man fails to notice.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (A scorpion is definitely either a mouse or a fish. Either way it has six legs.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Wait, no, it’s a baby theropod, and it has two legs. (Yes, this is the same manuscript, that’s not an error, this artist did four scorpions and no two are the same.))

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Actually it’s a lizard with tiny ears and it has four legs.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Now that we’re at the big fancy illustration, I think I’ve got it �� it’s like that last one, but two legs, longer ears, and a less goofy face. Also I’ve decided it’s not pink anymore, I think that was the main problem.)

13th-century England, MS Kk.4.25. (A scorpion is a flat crocodile with a bear’s head.)

13th-century England, "The Huth Psalter". (Wyvern but baby! Does not seem to be enjoying biting its own tail.)

13th-century England, MS Royal 1 D X. (This triangular-headed gentlecreature gets the award for “closest guess at correct limb configuration”. If two of those were claws, I might actually believe this artist had seen a scorpion before, or at least a picture of one.)

13th-century England, "The Westminster Psalter". (A scorpion is the offspring of a wyvern and a fawn.)

13th-century England, "The Rutland Psalter". (Too many legs! Pull back! Pull back!)

13th or 14th-century France, Bestiaire d'amour rimé. (This is very similar to the fawn-wyvern, but putting it in an actual Scene makes it even more obvious that you’re just guessing.)

14th-century Netherlands, Jacob van Maerlant's Der Naturen Bloeme. (More top-down six-legged guys that look too furry to be arthropods.)

14th-century Germany, MS Additional 22413. (That is clearly a turtle.)

14th-century France, Matfres Eymengau de Beziers's Breviari d'amor. (Who came up with that head shape and what was their deal?)

15th-century England, "Bestiary of Ann Walsh". (Screw it, a scorpion is a big lizard that glares at you for trying to make me draw things I don’t know about.)

I've spent way too much time on this now. End of post, thank you to anyone who got all the way down here.

#medieval #medieval creatures #medieval art #scorpions #medieval scorpions #manuscript #medieval manuscripts #illuminated manuscript

6K notes · View notes

emberwhite · 3 months

Text

Do people judge a book by its cover? They absolutely do. They take one look at this, and they either often instantly hate it or love it.

Talking about how things should be is just yelling into the void. There is just reality. And this is the reality of being a self-published indie author.

People make complete conclusions based off of incomplete information. In this case, my book, there are no adults pressuring the boy into getting any surgery. There's no mention of surgery at all even. This person is thinking of a children's book written by a very popular political figure. Some people have had the courtesy to ask me if it's like that book. It's not at all. It's not even political. It's a story told from the perspective of a kid who grows up knowing they are very different and yet can tell no one about it. Even saying a word about it would bring all of his deepest and darkest fears into reality.

The challenge was to make the story as dark and scary as I could without ever going too far for a children's book. There are already some scary children's books and movies out there that prove what's possible, and I worked with my illustrator, Marta, to push it as far as we could go. There's one page we had to re-do almost completely because even I said that's a bit much.

But I'm very happy with the final result because we also got to do so many fun and colorful pages like this.

There will be plenty more drive-by reviews as the book continues to grow and grow. They take one look and see a soapbox to express all of their disappointments and frustrations in life.

I think they might be scared of the book. The world they grew up in is slowly fading away day by day, and it's all they have come to know. They've been around for so long that everything has become a bore to them, and the only remaining pleasure is to escape into the past in order to better preserve it. I can oddly relate, actually.

So the book is on Amazon, and you can watch the whole thing for free on YouTube as well. If you get the chance, let me know what you think. Literally, watching it for free and then giving it a simple rating on Amazon is the best way to support the book. But I also love waking up to reviews like this every day.

#artists on tumblr #illustration #lgbtqia #queer #art #drawing #trans #transgender #furry

2K notes · View notes