As I continue to send query letters out and revise each chapter once again, I realize it could be a while before The Book of Inspiration sees the light of day.
Therefore I’d like to make the first of four parts available to interested readers. Just message me and I’ll provide a link to the pdf. Feedback would be welcome 🌸
Chapter titles/subjects are:
The Familiar The Productive Day Flow A Walk Outside Nature Animal Companionship Solitude & Community The Light We Live By For the Love of Color The Human Mark Mythology
New cover art- The Fall, by Tracy Townsend from Pyr Books. I’ve really enjoyed getting close with the characters and visualizing this imaginative steampunk series :)
Sequel to The Nine, an apothecary clerk and her ex-mercenary allies travel across the world to discover a computing engine that leads to secrets she wasn’t meant to know–secrets that could destroy humanity.
Cover for the newest edition of F(r)iction. The literary & art journal is available wherever you get books & magazines April 15th. The themes I was assigned when creating the image was both “rebellion” and “space” (without depicting science fiction).
New cover reveal for Everlasting Nora by Marie Cruz coming soon from Macmillan Publishing
“After a family tragedy results in the loss of both father and home, 12-year-old Nora lives with her mother in Manila’s North Cemetery, which is the largest shanty town of its kind in the Philippines today.”
Like dragons? Like tiny books? Check out the Art Order’s new collection on Kickstarter. Includes hundreds of artist’s portraits of dragons, including one my own not so tiny beasts.
Publishing is a tough business. As an illustrator you can spend many months working on a cover, through multiple stages of editors giving big thumbs up, only to have the piece killed at the last minute. So while I’m busy with new projects, here’s a peak at two covers from the recent past that won’t be appearing on bookstore shelves.
The original version for Raptor & Wren, before its current iteration.
Now on shelves, Thunderbird by Chuck Wendig, from Saga Press. Part of the Miriam Black crime/mystery series. Originally Firestarter, from Sing Chronos City painting series.
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
Introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Neil Postman
1985
A favorite book of mine. I’d recommend it as well as Technopoly and The End of Education.
