Well, for those who have yet to consume Peanut the Paperback or Peanut the e-book, here’s a sample of Peanut the Graphic Novel. I hope you enjoy it but please be content with this helping. It’s all I could be bothered to do and no more will be forthcoming.
God, Graphic novels are an insane amount of work! But fun (ish).
(Click on each page to enlarge)
My newest book, Peanut, is now available as an ebook on Amazon. It’s just as funny, revealing, memorable and diaper filling as the paperback version. It’s just less impressive on your bookshelf.
Go on, write another blogpost about Peanut.
But I haven’t had my damned breakfast yet.
Just do it.
Oh, fine.
Well, much as I love to draw, I also love to write. So this book, Peanut, the first one I’ve published that’s all about the writing, is like my shy bookish child who generally doesn’t come out when company’s around but is rather in a corner, nose between the pages, building up a steamy head of potential and finally stepping into the limelight to get her due. Now, you might say, if she’s so great why is she appearing on Blurb rather than on the front table of your corner Barnes & Gobble? Is she somehow lesser? Does her picturelessness make her somehow less worthy of someone’s hard-earned pennies? Seriously, there are gazillions of paperbacks clawing at the eyeballs of readers, jockeying to be read, and here you come with some sordid little manuscript and expect people to drop their kindles and snap it up? Be real, man, your illustrated books are being sold in Chinese bookstores, this is penny ante stuff. This little amusebouche isn’t gracing the front page of the Times Book Review. It’s not being chatted about on Morning Edition. Oprah hasn’t put her imprimatur on its cover. You dont see Jonathan Franzen uploading his books to Blur, do you?
True, true and true. The fact is the publishing world has a mighty machine built over a couple of centuries for grinding out books and profits and making sure everyone everywhere gets to read the same stuff at the same time. And the next fact is that self-publishing or ‘vanity publishing’ is a grimy little by-way a salon de refusés, full of conspiracy theorists and weekend poets that drizzles out awkwardly typeset drivel with badly designed cover art.
But here are some more relevant and freshly made facts. Thanks to the publishing colossus, it’s impossible for 99% of writers to survive as writers. Even really good ones end up spending most of their time teaching in creative writing departments of lesser-know midwestern colleges or cranking out reams of ad-copy or making half-caff lattes or flipping burgers or just giving up altogether. Now, no one owes writers a living as writers and the prevailing ethic in our society is that if you were any good you could make a living at your craft, but a glance at the Times Bestseller list shows that to do so you have to be James Patterson or Nora Roberts to make ends meet in the publishing world and that the majority of people who get to spend their-full time live making books are editors, publishers, printers, publicists, and agents — not writers.
Now, I love all of my editors and publishers and printers and such, but not so much that they deserve to get 92% of your money whenever you buy one of my books. I mean, I put up with it, but come on. 92%?
Writers have bitched about this inequity since Dickens’ day and finally we have an alternatives. In today’s Times, you can read about Susan Orleans venture into Amazon Singles where she gets 70 cents on every dollar. (She’s a big deal writer of course and is able to get a big article in a big paper to promote her little book so she’s hardly typical). E-books give writers a slightly larger bite of the pie. We get 25% royalties on all the books that publishers don’t need to print or warehouse or ship or even lift a finger to reproduce. But, as has happened in the music business, the real opportunity for writers is to short the chain that connects us to our readers. To make books available without all the middle men. That means readers get books faster (it can take over a year or more for a book to go from the author through the production machine and into your local bookstore) and cheaper (seriously, $30 for a new hardcover?) and more. More because when your favorite authors can focus on making books instead of burgers, you end up with more books you love.
It’s all up to authors to take more leaps into the new order of things and try their hand at self-promotion and self-production. And that is possible and fairly simple when you make a book that’s all text. Most of my books, illustrated, four-color, beautifully printed, are partnerships between me and a group of editors and designers who really add value and earn some (if not all) of their 92%. But when it comes to a straightforward book like Peanut, well, it’s not that hard to make it available to readers in an edition that is virtually the same as they’d find in a bookstore,
There are still a lot of things to be worked out. publishing on demand is still a fairly expensive model. And I have no idea if most of my readers have kindles nooks and ipads and such. If they did it would be easier to make sand distribute electronic books that include color and even video demonstrations and commentary. That may be a few years away and frankly the publishing world doesn’t have that much incentive to make it happen. Instead, we, authors and readers can make that more common and available by supporting authors who show interest in inventing new ways of distribution.
I hope I haven’t created the impression that I am begging for your money here.
Believe me, I do fine toiling in the salt mines of advertising and will hopefully do so for some time.But it would be nice to think that an author who has a base of loyal readers might be able to connect with them directly and together they could provide an atmosphere in which writers could spend more time and effort making the books we all love.
I also realize that none of this is a particularly persuasive reason to buy and read Peanut in particular*. The fact that it’s self published on Blur (like many other books I probably wouldnt read), shouldnt make it a must buy. But if you like my writing, and the idea of the book, and have looked at a few pages in the free sample preview, then don’t let the fact that it is coming to you through this more untraditional venue hold you back from buying a copy.
You will be joining me at the barricades, striking another blow for creativity liberty, and breathing heavily down the hunched backs of the capitalist running dogs. Vive la revolution!
Alright, now can we eat breakfast?
I think I’ll have marmite on toast….
—-
* Il’ll try to do a better job of selling you on Peanut, in the days ahead.
When Patti was pregnant, so was I. Pregnant with a book that turned our endless nine months+ into 250+ pages of memoir. I have been working on Peanut in various forms ever since, if you can believe it. It’s tried being a regular book, a graphic novel, and an online serial. And now, finally, here it is a readable form you can carry around with you and read until your are fully entertained and edified.
Back then, I was terribly interested in the experience of becoming a father and I just couldn’t find much that was practical that had been written about it. After the book was written, I came to realize that it was tricky to fill this void in the bookstore in the standard way. Because books need to be shelved in particular sections at your local Barnes & Noble or even on Amazon, no one knew quite where to put my book. It was sort of a memoir (back in the days before memoirs were routinely bestsellers) but more specific. And it wasn’t really appropriate for the pregnancy section because it was about a man’s experience. Anyway, it got kicked around by a bunch of publishers and finally got punted into the weeds.
I always felt that was a shame as I really liked it; I think it’s by far the funniest book I’ve written and re-reading it as I have been recently, it cracked me up over and again. I think it’s also very insightful, about what it means to be a parent and yet remain the child of one’s parents and grandparents.
It’s also a shame because it helps to explain an awful lot about me, about the family forces that shape my view of the world and the uniques experience I had as a kid. Slowly but surely, the most important events in my life, good and bad, are becoming books — Everyday Matters; my new book on Patti’s death; and this, the prequel, Peanut.
Anyway, I have had it with trying to flog the book in the traditional way. But I really do want people to read it. So I have decided to have a number of copies printed up to see if you, the people who have supported my work for years, might be interested in reading it and maybe helping me birth it in some form. It’s a little paperback, decent quality with one of my paintings on the cover. It doesn’t contain any drawings or even the word ‘drawing’ but if you like the way I write and share my perspective on the world, you might find it entertaining. And if you’ve ever been a parent or a child, I think it’ll be right up your alley.
The book is available now —and you might want to act now. This may sound like a hucksterish pitch (though it’s 100% true, I swear) but the printer just told me they will be raising the price by a dollar in the next 48 hours. I think the book is worth that additional dollar but, if that gives you pause, please order it today or tomorrow (May 18th). Or wait till the weekend and spring for the extra buck. Your call. Or, better yet, get in under the deadline and order yourself a dozen or so copies and sell them to the neighbors for an additional 50 cents and pocket the difference. I won’t tell.
If you get it, let me know what you think. And how you think we can collectively make it into a bestseller that will transform parenting as we know it. I welcome your collaboration and critique.
Thanks to everyone who supports my book and has ordered the book so far. If this experiment is successful, I will publish more books in this sort of immediate, hand made way in the future.
It’s exciting getting to work on a new book. The excitement kicks off with the first advance check, now nestled in my bank — but that’s short-lived. The real fun is figuring out all of the bits and pieces and how they fit together. I don’t have a huge amount of time to work on this book but enough so that I can go back and rewrite and redraw things until I really like them.
When my editor read my blogpost announcing my deal with Chronicle, she wrote to me to remind me that the book is not in fact scheduled for next year but the middle of 2013. Yipes. I promised I could get things done faster if she could compress the schedule on her end and we managed to swap things around so now the book will come out six months earlier in the Fall/Winter 2012. I have until October 1 to get the first draft in which should be plenty of time (famous last words).
Much of this book is drawn from the illustrated journals I’ve kept over the past 13 months but they’re all being reworked and augmented. My journal captures the here and now so vividly but a book needs to have a more lofty perspective too, a way of winding everything together into a narrative. While the book has a clear beginning, the end is fuzzier and so I have decided to bring the story to an end after a full year, the official mourning period. Mourning, of course, takes a lot longer than a year — it seems to be a lifelong process — but the book has to stop somewhere.
Beyond my illustrated journals, I have been writing a lot, little paragraphs, captured thoughts, revelations, and I am blending them into the pages I have already drawn and painted. That means a fair amount of editing but it’s all being created with snapshots of my moods taken as they appear.
The book will open with a section focussed on Patti’s life, trying to bring her to life on the page, to tell her story before I start to hog the stage. That section of the book is going to be done in a new way, quite different from my usual style, drawings done entirely with a brush and watercolors. There’s no ink, no solid lines. And I am working from photographs, as they are all I have of her now.
I worked with this palette of eight different shades of Dr.Ph Martin watercolors. I keep them in a dark bag because they just can’t stand the sunlight. They work fine in books that remain closed most of the time.
First I drew a light contour drawing in pencil, so I would have a vague sense of where I am going.
Then I used a couple of shades of blue to do an underpainting, getting a sense of the tones. Often, this is my favorite part of a painting and I wished I’d just left it monochromatic.
I next added two dark shades of brown to build up contrast.
Next I added warm tones and started to work on the skin.
Now I added more reds and yellows.
And here’s where I left off today, with a little bit of writing in the corner. Chances are I’ll tackle this picture again after it’s been lying around for a few days.There’s still something sort of frozen and taxidermic about this, one of the reasons I ‘m not wild about working from photos, particularly contrasty ones taken with a flash. Hopefully it will also improve once I;ve written all around it. Look for it (or some descendant) in my next book.
I just received an exciting delivery from my publisher, F+W: two lovely new editions of my last book, “An Illustrated Life”. A Chinese version and a two-volume version from Taiwan.
I’ve kept an illustrated journal, fairly consistently, for the last dozen years or more. There have been times I got too involved with office work or other distractions and my entries grew more intermittent, but I’ve always come back to a pen and a book to get perspective on my life. When I published Everyday Matters and the books that followed, I made a decision to share this ongoing record of the events of my life with people who I don’t know personally. It was never a particularly hard choice to make because I think that an essential part of art making is a desire to share one’s view of the world with others. It’s not just creation, it’s communication.
I also discovered that the actual details of my private life that I put on display were less important than the fact that I was recording my life in the way that I was. People were far more interested in this practice as an idea that they too could embrace and adopt themselves than in the revelations of the contents of my medicine cabinet or the places I walk my dogs.
The dialogue that I established between the people who viewed and commented on my work in my books and on the web, also helped to sustain my interest — like a vast, relatively quiet audience insisting that I keep up the habit. When I first began drawing in my solitary book, it was something that only I knew and cared about. All these years later, there are so many people doing the same sort of thing and sharing it with me and others, and the act of keeping an illustrated journal has become far richer and more satisfying all around.
I went back to keeping a journal soon after Patti was killed. In fact, I did it with a new sense of purpose because my life needed perspective and clarity more than ever. I discovered a whole new style of journaling too, far more colorful and intense than before, an approach that matched my whole take on life after facing this turn of events. My life has become quite different and so have my journals.
I also continued to share what I was doing, right here on this blog. But after a while, the well-meaning, compassionate outpouring of my readers started to weigh on me. I felt like I was making myself carry out this process in the most public way, adding all sorts of additional pressures that I couldn’t handle at the time. But I felt I needed to carry on because there were so many people who seemed to care about us and what we were going through, who wanted to know how we were doing, and I didn’t feel I could just vanish and withdraw. But people close to me said, “All that matters right now is taking care of yourself and Jack. Take time to focus on what matters most and everything else can wait.”
So eventually, I started to fade away, blogging less and less and then not at all.
But I kept on drawing and confiding in my books, continuing to feel that what I have been going through is something I ought to capture and (eventually) examine. And I knew, from some of the most heart-wrenching emails and comments I got, that there were people out there who were going through similar trauma and transition and that eventually I might want to share what I was experiencing with them and others.
At times, I’ve felt like it might be possible to tie this whole experience into a neat package, something with a beginning, middle and end. A story with a moral, a bunch of quippy epigrams that would pass on my lessons earned. It’s turned out to be a lot messier, as life is prone to be.
When the anniversary of Patti’s death came and went, a date I had been long anticipating as the official end of my mourning period, at first it seemed like nothing much had changed. I still felt alternately good, bad, shitty, and fine. There was no massive parting of the clouds or turning of a giant page. I was still alive, Patti was still dead. I hadn’t forgotten much; in fact, I think I now remember more about our lives than I had before. Life goes on but in lots of ways I guess I am pretty different.
As Jack and I began our second lap of the calendar, I felt a shift. We were no longer going through the first day of Spring without Patti, the first birthdays, the first Christmas. Instead, we had were firming up our own era, more clearly defining the way we live as two independent people without a wife and a mom. Sadness is no longer overwhelming and debilitating, it’s just a feeling that ‘s there, that can be summoned up and hugged or put back on the shelf for another time.
Now, when I think about Patti, I am rarely sad. And I do think about her, several times every single day. But lots of the guilt and fear and darkness and panic that accompanied those thoughts are rarely present. Instead, I feel like she’s just by my side, accompanying me through a new set of doors, advising, encouraging, being my friend and my love.
So maybe that’s closure. I don’t really know the meaning of the word and I don’t feel like anything is closed. It’s more that I am mounting a staircase out of the darkness, seeing more and more around me, but my eyes are still sufficiently accommodated to the darkness I’ve passed through to be able to look back without fear and see what was what.
… Actually, I started writing this to tell you some news.
Those pages I’ve been filling (and a bunch more that I am making that will lend some introduction and perspective to my journal) are going to be made into a new book. It’s going to be published by a wonderful publisher in San Francisco, Chronicle Books, and they will be bringing it out sometime next year. Fortunately, I have a while to work on it and to figure out how to turn this experience into something coherent and good enough to be a tribute to Patti and her life.
A rather unpleasant book editor in New York told someone I know, “I can understand why he feels the need to write such a book but I can’t see why anyone would want to read it.” She may well turn out to be right.
But right now, I’m focussing more on how to do it well and make it true. If it turns out to be of no real use to anyone but me, I can live with that. I may regret sharing the pain and discovery of this last year with more strangers but I doubt it. I have been lucky enough to have so much encouragement in the work I have done over the years and I like to think it has been helpful to share my perspective with others.
I know it has been helpful to me.
Danny Gregory 