Throughout my childhood and teen
years, I was always drawing. My favorite thing was cartooning, and in high
school, I spent countless hours drawing comic books for my best friend, mostly
because I loved to make her laugh. But because I was sure I’d never make a
living as an artist, I put away my drawing pencils and opted to study other
subjects in college and graduate school.
A few years later, around the time I
was turning thirty, I started to miss the part of me I’d given up, and I began
to take art and animation classes several nights a week, after work. I also became
involved in San Francisco’s animation community. I was lucky enough to land two
jobs in the animation field while I was still a student.
When I moved from San Francisco to
Santa Cruz, I changed my focus a bit and started studying graphic design, since
animation jobs were few and far between. Again, I got lucky and landed a job
working as the graphic designer for a start-up, family-owned adventure sports magazine.
Because I had strong writing skills, I was soon asked to edit the stories
submitted to the magazine, and I even began writing a monthly column, in
addition to serving as the magazine’s entire art department.
I stuck with that job for quite a
while, until I decided to become a parent. Then, for the next few years, I focused
on my child as a stay-at-home mom. But because I’m the kind of person who
always has to have a creative outlet, I also started writing, usually late at
night, after my son and then-husband went to bed. At first, it was just for me.
But when my son was about nine, I took a chance and published my first book.
Jump ahead four years, and here I am,
with a writing career I absolutely adore. I was thinking about that recently
and asking myself how writing had so thoroughly supplanted drawing as my life’s
passion. And then I had an epiphany: I’ve been a storyteller all my life. As a little
kid, my drawings were always accompanied by verbal narratives, even before I
knew how to write. When I was a teen, I channeled my energy into writing and
illustrating comic books. Later on, when I decided to study animation, it was
because I wanted to make movies. The medium may have changed, and changed
again, but at the heart of it, there’s always been the same undeniable need: to
tell stories.
So now I write, and often, I write
artists. To me they’re fascinating people, and I think I understand what drives
them. The first artist I wrote was Christopher Robin. I introduced him in All
In, the second book in the series, and made him the main character in book 3,
In Pieces. That opened the door to write a couple more artists, his friends and
classmates Skye (my main character in Skye Blue) and Christian (the main
character in Against the Wall). Christopher is a painter, and his photorealistic
oil paintings are similar in tone and style to those of Andrew Wyeth.
Meanwhile, Skye is a found-object metal sculptor, and Christian is a graffiti
artist.
(this is the background image I used on the cover of Against the wall; credit: Shutterstock)
The three characters met at Sutherlin,
a private art college. Random fact: while a lot of my San Francisco locations
are real, Sutherlin is not. The name is borrowed from a small town in southern
Oregon, a couple hours north of me. Its only significance in my life is that I
always stop there for coffee whenever I drive to Portland. :)
Sutherlin is loosely based on
Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida (though without Florida's decidedly
tropical feel). Flagler is a four-year liberal arts college with a
well-respected art program. When I was in St. Augustine about five or six
years ago, I walked past the absolutely breathtaking campus and noticed a
young guy sitting high up on a brick wall, lost in thought as he drew on a big
sketch pad. And I remember thinking what a dream come true it would be to get to study art someplace so beautiful.
I think the essence of that guy with
the sketch pad has informed several of my characters. Maybe it’s wish
fulfillment in a way. My characters are doing what I didn’t when I made the decision
to study something more ‘practical’ in college: they’re plunging into the art
world headlong without worrying about failure. They’re following their passion.
And maybe I’m living vicariously through them, even though I really believe my
winding career path has led me exactly where I need to be.
Below
is the opening scene from Against the Wall, the 7th book in my
Firsts and Forever Series. The main character, Christian, is a street artist
along the lines of Banksy, though he works on a much larger scale. Christian is
trying to bring beauty to a bleak urban landscape, and his spray-painted murals
are meant to convey messages of hope. I love this character, because he has so
much courage.
It was time to go.
It was past time,
actually. I knew this. But even as part of my brain was chanting come on, come on, come on, another part
was thinking almost there, just one more
minute, that’s all I need. The part of my brain that promised one more
minute was a liar. One minute always turned into two, then five, then ten.
I shook the can of pink
paint in my hand. According to the label, it wasn’t actually pink. It was Ferocious Fuchsia. Who named these
things? I stretched up as high as I could, the pile of pallets beneath me
swaying just a bit, and brought my arm around in a wide arc as I pushed the
nozzle with my index finger. The oh-so-familiar smell of spray paint flooded my
senses and with my free hand, I tugged the black bandana that was wrapped
around my face up an inch, so that it covered my nose completely.
With a few quick movements,
I used the pink paint to highlight the enormous face of a young girl, just
beginning to take shape on the back wall of a condemned apartment building.
Then I leaned back a bit to assess the mural, which was tough to do in the dim
light. It didn’t help that I was wearing sunglasses, both to protect my eyes
from the paint and to hide my face from the security cams that dotted the city.
My unsteady perch wobbled, and I crouched down a bit to lower my center of
gravity.
Leave
it, Christian, you can come back later. You know you’ve been here too long.
The rational part of my brain always lost out to the adrenaline junkie though,
the ‘one more minute’ part of me that needed to be here, painting, creating,
all while on high alert, just waiting for the police or some random street thug
to roll up on me.
That adrenaline rush was
as much a part of it as the need to make art. I knew that about myself. I
probably could go through legal channels and get permission for my murals, but
where was the thrill in that? I absolutely lived for this. I really didn’t want to get caught,
though. Jail was so not part of the plan.
Given that, it was
incredibly stupid that I was out here so early on a Friday night. It wasn’t
even one a.m. The city wasn’t asleep yet, not fully, but I’d been obsessed with
this painting all week. I saw it so clearly in my mind’s eye, this little girl
in a field of daisies, and I needed to make her real. Well, little wasn’t quite the right word. By
the time I was finished, she’d be almost twenty feet high.
