My life this past year has been absolute chaos, as some of you may know. Whether you care or not is up to you, I'm definitely not asking for pity. But here's a rundown of my year:

August 2011 - My bf of 4 years left me as I was still job searching, left me with all the bills and a little girl to take care of (not his!) and took his ass back to Texas.

October 2011 - My first 'mate' (as in the first person I dated within the fandom) dumped me, completely crushed.

October 2011 - Lost my place to live, went to live with family. Never have gotten along with them, life was absolutely miserable.

** March 2012** - My parents' house catches fire, total loss. Homeless, yet again.

April 2012 - Mom goes in for emergency surgery on my birthday, step dad comes home afterward and proceeds to literally blame me for every little thing that has gone wrong in his marriage. Little known fact: try to commit suicide by running my car into a tree. I don't want asspats for this, just stating a fact. Get told by a friend that I "complain too much."

June 2012 - Anthrocon. Best time of my life. Come home, post-con depression hits, two days later get told I'm being kicked out of our loaner house because my presence stresses out my step dad, even though I spend 99% of my time in my room to avoid dickface or run the risk of being bitched at for being in the living room. Worst part: my parent turn around and apply for legal guardianship of my little girl because, GASP, I'm now homeless. Other shit happens, which I won't go into;I struggle to keep a positive attitude.

July 2012 to present - Move to Arizona to live with family while I pick myself back up after almost a full year of absolute bullshit. (Seriously, was I complete bitch in a past life or something?!)

Now, I'm not complaining. I believe that every experience in life, good or bad, is a lesson that helps mold us. I believe that you get out of life only what you put into it... so I try my damndest to only put in positivity. I prefer to take the positive side of things with the hope that SOMETHING good will happen eventually. It has to, right?

Anyway, onto the actual point of this journal in madness.

Sometimes, life just sucks. For those of use who write or paint or sketch, whatever (ie. artists) our inspiration is wholly dependent on our moods. For anyone who is trying to create unique pieces of art, our emotions show through in our work. A depressed artist either can't create anything, or their work is perhaps subpar. The lucky or talented ones can still create, which is great for them, but sadly I'm not one of them. When I'm feeling down on myself, nothing I create looks good. I get almost violently critical of my art and just.... put my tablet or sketchbook down and walk away. I can't do it. And so, I owe people commissions from many months ago, and I feel horrible about it. Seriously, it's possibly the worst feeling. I HATE making people wait for anything... I'm such a people pleaser and I have failed at it.

To those of you who have been patient with me, thank you. You have no idea how much that helps. To those of you criticizing me for taking so long, I leave you this excerpt from http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html :

Hi Neil,

I've recently subscribed to George RR Martin's blog (http://grrm.livejournal.com/) in the hopes of getting some inside information regarding when the next "Song of Ice and Fire" book is due to be released. I love the series but since subscribing to the blog I've become increasingly frustrated with Martin's lack of communication on the next novel's publication date. In fact, it's almost as though he is doing everything in his power to avoid working on his latest novel. Which poses a few questions:

1. With blogs and twitter and other forms of social media do you think the audience has too much input when it comes to scrutinising the actions of an artist? If you had announced a new book two years ago and were yet to deliver do you think avoiding the topic on your blog would lead readers to believe you were being "slack"? By blogging about your work and life do you have more of a responsibility to deliver on your commitments?

2. When writing a series of books, like Martin is with "A Song of Ice and Fire" what responsibility does he have to finish the story? Is it unrealistic to think that by not writing the next chapter Martin is letting me down, even though if and when the book gets written is completely up to him?

Would be very interested in your insight.

Cheers

Gareth

My opinion....

1) No.

2) Yes, it's unrealistic of you to think George is "letting you down".

Look, this may not be palatable, Gareth, and I keep trying to come up with a better way to put it, but the simplicity of things, at least from my perspective is this:

George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.

This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly George is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there typing what you want to read right now.

People are not machines. Writers and artists aren't machines.

You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.

No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.

It seems to me that the biggest problem with series books is that either readers complain that the books used to be good but that somewhere in the effort to get out a book every year the quality has fallen off, or they complain that the books, although maintaining quality, aren't coming out on time.

Both of these things make me glad that I am not currently writing a series, and make me even gladder that the decade that I did write series things, in Sandman, I was young, driven, a borderline workaholic, and very fortunate. (and even then, towards the end, I was taking five weeks to write a monthly comic, with all the knock-on problems in deadlines that you would expect from that).

For me, I would rather read a good book, from a contented author. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.

Some writers need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their books very rapidly. Some writers write a page or so every day, rain or shine. Some writers run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they're ready to write again. Sometimes writers haven't quite got the next book in a series ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that's ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the author could possibly write Book X while the fans were waiting for Book Y.

I remember hearing an upset comics editor telling a roomful of other editors about a comics artist who had taken a few weeks off to paint his house. The editor pointed out, repeatedly, that for the money the artist would have been paid for those weeks' work he could easily have afforded to hire someone to paint his house, and made money too. And I thought, but did not say, “But what if he wanted to paint his house?”

I blew a deadline recently. Terminally blew it. First time in 25 years I've sighed and said, “I can't do this, and you won't get your story.” It was already late, I was under a bunch of deadline pressure, my father died, and suddenly the story, too, was dead on the page. I liked the voice it was in, but it wasn't working, and eventually, rather than drive the editors and publishers mad waiting for a story that wasn't going to come, I gave up on it and apologised, worried that I could no longer write fiction.

I turned my attention to the next deadline waiting – a script. It flowed easily and delightfully, was the most fun I've had writing anything in ages, all the characters did exactly what I had hoped they would do, and the story was better than I had dared to hope.

Sometimes it happens like that. You don't choose what will work. You simply do the best you can each time. And you try to do what you can to increase the likelihood that good art will be created.

And sometimes, and it's as true of authors as it is of readers, you have a life. People in your world get sick or die. You fall in love, or out of love. You move house. Your aunt comes to stay. You agreed to give a talk half-way around the world five years ago, and suddenly you realise that that talk is due now. Your last book comes out and the critics vociferously hated it and now you simply don't feel like writing another. Your cat learns to levitate and the matter must be properly documented and investigated. There are deer in the apple orchard. A thunderstorm fries your hard disk and fries the backup drive as well...

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

The economics of scale for a writer mean that very few of us can afford to write 5,000 page books and then break them up and publish them annually once they are done. So writers with huge stories, or ones that, as Sandman did, grow in the telling, are going to write them and have them published as they go along.

And if you are waiting for a new book in a long ongoing series, whether from George or from Pat Rothfuss or from someone else...

Wait. Read the original book again. Read something else. Get on with your life. Hope that the author is writing the book you want to read, and not dying, or something equally as dramatic. And if he paints the house, that's fine.

And Gareth, in the future, when you see other people complaining that George R.R. Martin has been spotted doing something other than writing the book they are waiting for, explain to them, more politely than I did the first time, the simple and unanswerable truth: George R. R. Martin is not working for you.

Hope that helps.

And to any of you who actually got through this, I offer this in thanks:

Give me an idea for a rough sketch, something simple.

I will likely do it traditionally and take a pic to upload (until I can get a scanner). This will help me a)get in some simple practice, and b) keep me moving forward and give me a break while I flail around on my digital commissions. (YES, I'm working on them, but I'm not HAPPY with them, hence the flailing. SO MUCH ERASER GAH)