Hello Powells,
Happy hump day.
We are almost at the end of July.
I am terrified about July ending because, in case you aren’t aware, after July comes August. And do you know what needs to happen in August? ALL of the artwork for Marty Moose book 3 needs to be delivered at the end of it.
I was meant to have three months to illustrate the 160 pages that make up my Marty books but somehow, SOMEHOW! (HOW! HOW? HOW?!), I only have 6 weeks.
This is not ideal.
I repeat: Not. Ideal. At. All.
I have found myself in this situation many times; which is worrying in its repetitiveness but a comfort in its familiarity. When a deadline of this magnitude is looming you can expect the following 12-steps to unfold:
You avoid facing the facts and pretend it’s not happening. You busy yourself with light-hearted matters such as pruning roses or choosing paint samples for rooms you suddenly must paint even though you never go into them.
The feeling that you need to do something very important follows you wherever you go.
Three more days pass. The feeling grows bigger and your insides start to churn like you’re internally making cheese.
You wake with a jolt on a Saturday morning and suddenly realise the magnitude of the thing you’ve been ignoring. You race to the Marie Curie calendar you got for Christmas which is hanging in the kitchen convinced that maybe, whilst you’ve been sleeping, an extra month has been added.
When you realise that the amount of weeks between now and your delivery date has not expanded by 30 days you spend the next hour panicking about the time you have left. Expect to chastise yourself for wasting three days looking at paint samples, which are all practically the same colour anyway.
Your panic reaches a crescendo around midday and you fire off an emotionally charged email to your agent (which you later regret and which will require another email be sent, this time apologising for the original emotionally charged email).
Your husband suggests you go for a walk. You will resist this momentarily because you ‘don’t have time!’ You may even make the insane statement that ‘you won’t have time to go for a walk until September’.
You go for a walk.
The fresh air calms you. You see the vast sky and the tiny flowers. You realise that you are on a gigantic spinning ball of fire, encrusted with a few nice trees, a couple of oceans and too many branches of Tesco. It’s all fine.
You get home, drink nine cups of tea, slap yourself about the face with the wet fish that happens to be lying around and get down to business. You gather your tools and clean your workspace. You waft some incense to ‘cleanse’ the space, of what you’re not sure. Then, you print off ALL the pages and put them in three piles: easy; sort-of-easy; insanely-complicated.
The last pile brings you out in a cold sweat so you decide to leave that till last.
You choose the easiest one off the ‘easy’ pile and… begin. It doesn’t take as long as you thought. Suddenly you feel emboldened and a glimmer of hope flickers across your consciousness: this might actually be possible.
I will be back on Friday with this week’s Drawing Telegram. Until then…
From the bottom of The Pile,
Powell x
P.S. Please do share, re-stack, like, and comment, as I won’t be going outside until September so you’re the only connection I have to the real world right now.
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