Mental Can Openers & Writer's Hash ~ Help!

Help!  I’ve Fallen into a Drawing and Can’t Picture a Way Out

"I have got to create more products."

An artist-bronzing friend of mine made this statement to me when I inquired as to the health of his sculpture business. He replied he needed to make more statues. I asked him what the holdup was, expecting to hear about issues with clay or metal or the foundry.

Instead, he lamented that all his time vanished tending business concerns, including shipping, marketing, advertising, website design, tax laws, and the like. As screaming bells went off in my head, I told him it was too bad he wasn't a writer. We writers are a natural combination of Hemmingway, FedEx, Tony Robbins, Steve Jobs, and H&R Block – NOT.  Unfortunately, in my case, I forgot to throw in Rembrandt or da Vinci.

The writer’s key platform today is the “website.” Named, I assumed, because of the vast array of crisscrossing computer lines linking various sites. I now suspect they adopted the sobriquet, "web" because tech illiterate hosts jump into this matrix and then can’t escape. They writhe helpless, like the first victim who establishes the deadly stakes for the other houseguests, trapped in a B-rate, Vincent Price movie.  I can't shake that feeling when I struggle around in my web.  Are there amused, eight-limbed, jewel-eyed, byte-spiders, the kind who “hot-link it over dark arrays to suck the cloud dry of juicy credit data,” “LoL”-ing me? The ways of webs, learn you should, young Padawan!

All this computing and marketing adds up to a learning "curve" that looks like something Wiley E. Coyote would fall off of chasing the Road Runner.  But that cliff can be conquered with the help of knowledgeable friends, YouTube videos, and a competent writers group (mine rivals the Inklings by the way.)  For the fantasy genre, add a portable Prozac IV drip, a Pez dispensing Pepsid AC like a Gatling gun, and Rogaine for the suddenly missing hair.

What friends and videos can’t provide is talent you do not have. Visuals and graphics to illustrate a fantasy website are not commonplace. One does not pop down to the park to snap a banshee loitering about or a UFO disembarking an invasion force.  Much of what's offered insists, quite justifiably, on remuneration. The artistic hand, imagination, and software manipulation tools and skills are a profession in and of themselves.

My sculpting abilities peaked in a seventh-grade art class. While other kids made heads or pots, I rolled the clay out flat, and then cut six sides for a cool Dracula coffin. When my fingers put it together, it looked better suited to bury a slouching hunch-shoulder of Notre Dame. My use of colors was more refined – coffin black.   

But drawing?  I tried one of those Bob Ross TV courses. Clearing my brush, I slapped it across the tripod leg like Bob did – it slapped me back!  Then my "happy little tree" Bob said I could put anywhere, grabbed the paintbrush hairs and instantly hardened.  I failed to notice as my palette knife attacked a plugged tube of forest green that then bled across the autumn orange into my sky blue.  I was terrified the EPA would show up with a warrant.  “Joy of Painting” filed for damages and the cable company inexplicably removed my access.  Eh -- art world’s loss.

Now, I'm left dependent on a high school graduate in graphics who just married her boyfriend. In a feat of selflessness unrivaled in Clan Leach’s history, I urged her not to spend all of her honeymoon time at the Bleeding Moose Lodge & One Hour/Every Hour Wedding Chapel working on my project.  Spend a few minutes with the groom, I said.  I’m paying for that generosity now. 

Yes, Ridley Bundleforth and the Banshee's Bell, my forthcoming novel, remains jacket-less. And with cold weather coming, too. Where am I going to find another starving graphic artist, unmarried with no prospects, shivering in some grotto, with a frozen mouse and a cracked I-pad?  One with the angelic flare of a digital Raphael, the imagination of a Jules Verne, but the business acumen of a Ralph Kramden?

No, like my artistic friend, I’m caught between needing to create product and trying to develop a deeply latent artistic talent for drawing banshees and bells.  So far, I’d have better luck trying to win “America’s Got Talent,” singing Sinatra’s, “Fly Me to the Moon” through a knotted soda straw.  So it's back to my trusty 64 shades – Crayola don't let me down. Now if I can only find an image with color by numbers...?

~Roulf Burrell