Summer Bottleship
Greetings, friends—
What a month it's been. Good things and bad, all mixed together, all happening at once. I hope you are all safe and cared for out there. If you have bucks to chip in toward disaster relief, the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund is a solid place to start. The ACLU and SPLC are also never a bad idea.
I personally stretched myself a bit too thin in August and have been meditating on community and obligation and support and nourishment and how we spend our time—alone and with each other. It's always a balancing act.
Here are some things I've been looking forward to sharing since I last wrote:
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If you missed the 100 Demon Dialogues Kickstarter and want to get a book or a plush demon of your very own, pre-orders are live! Stock up in advance of the ship date in early 2018.
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Speaking of 100 Demon Dialogues, I left for Iceland right after the campaign closed and spent two weeks in the wilderness with Light Grey Art Lab's Artist Residency program. It was amazing. You can see the 23 pages of plein air paintings, sketches, and studies I completed during the trip in this PDF or (in slightly lower resolution) on Facebook.
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Also: if you've ever been curious, here's every tool I use while drawing in the field:
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While I was away I tore through Robert Moor's book On Trails. If you'd like a good intro to Moor's writing, meander through this essay in Lapham's Quarterly. His stuff is a must-read for fans of Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking or Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks. (Speaking of which, Solnit and MacFarlane will be in conversation at the Cambridge Literary Festival in November. Someone please record it for me. I'll love you forever.)
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Cartozia Tales, the collaborative all-ages fantasy series I've been contributing to for the last few years, is nearing its tenth and final issue! To help fund our last print run I'm selling off some original artwork from the series.
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This obituary of a Macedonian scholar who translated Moby-Dick into his native tongue, despite the language's total lack of maritime terminology, is fascinating.
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I have a new podcast episode up this month with Portland-based yoga teacher Abby Kraai. We dug deep into the idea of practice and what it can bring to the table in our pursuits. Abby has an amazing background in all kinds of things (Ultimate Frisbee! Improv comedy! Teaching English!) so I loved hearing her perspective.
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If you're a self-published cartoonist (or writer) looking to understand distribution, I wrote a primer for you! Learn all about scary terms like "wholesale" and "consignment" and how to price your minis so they'll actually (sort of) turn a profit.
"Remember Pascal’s warning against the error of Stoicism, which is to believe that you can do always what you can really only do sometimes."
Take a deep breath, feel your feet on the earth. Remember that you're alive, and that you're here.
Lucy