Inspiring

Neil Gaiman's commencement speech has already gone viral, but I had to post it, if only for myself to go back and watch again. So much brilliant advice for creative folks. Enjoy!

Inspiring.

My friend Lynda, on Defying Logic, Fighting Gravity, and Other Lynda-esque Kinds of Things. Read the comments, too. Good stuff.

Random Quote

The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
–Marcel Proust

Random Quotes

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stuck?

Here's a list that might help.

Random Quotes

"Just like children, anyone who regularly engages in the work of art develops a life filled with wonder, yearning, flow, and serious play all over the place. Is that childish? To me, it is the definition of being mature."
– Eric Booth, The Everyday Work of Art

I've dipped in and out of this book for a few years now-- time to sit down and read it straight through.

Friday Fun: Other People's Sketchbooks

I love seeing what other people do with their sketchbooks.

Boot + Shoe + Luck = Story

Last week I promised that I'd share the inspiration behind my second book, Sam Bennett's New Shoes. Here's my rambling tale...

As I mentioned in my Door Day post, my family lives in an old colonial farmhouse that was built around the year 1720. Did I mention that it was a total disaster when we bought it, and that the realtors thought we were nuts? (In fact, we heard that a builder had wanted to buy it as a tear-down... don't get me started on that rant.) The house had sat vacant for over a year and our kids were very, very young. In hindsight, we were nuts! But the house had so much history. And we loved it.

So-- one day, my handy husband was hanging a chandelier in the dining room. He cut a hole through the plaster and put his hand inside and came out with... this boot. No kidding! Of course we wondered-- whose was it and what on earth was it doing there? 18th century hide-and-go-seek champion, perhaps? We filled it with dried flowers, put it on the mantel and pondered.

































A few months later it was wintertime. And having nothing better to do, hubby was rummaging around in the basement. Mind you, when I say basement I don't mean the wall-to-wall carpeting, finished basement/rec room kind. I mean old house basement-- bulging stone walls, dirt floor and spider factory. But it is one of his favorite spots in the house because, seriously, an old house basement has tons of information about the age of a house and how it was constructed. So it really is pretty cool.

He was in a crawlspace section that had once been an outside porch, but was enclosed not long after the house was built, judging from the beams. As he was rummaging through old rocks and spoons and shards of pottery (since in the olden days people usually buried their trash outside) he found... this shoe. No kidding! It's hard to see in the photos, but there were still pegs holding it together. The leather was almost petrified. Now we were really curious!


















As serendipity would have it, around that time Early American Life magazine ran an article about finding just these sorts of shoes hidden in old houses. They were called "concealment" shoes-- well-worn shoes that were past their useful life hidden on purpose, probably to protect the houses from malevolent spirits.

This set us off on a lot of research and, of course, sparked my imagination. Who wore the boot and the shoe? What was life like for them? Living in an old house naturally leads you to wonder these kinds of things anyway, but somehow the boot and shoe made it so much more immediate. They had taken on the shape of their owner's feet. They seemed so personal.

I thought about this for a few years, and eventually Sam Bennett came about-- a young boy growing up on a farm in colonial times gets his first pair of new shoes, and learns about the tradition of hiding old shoes from his papa.

In case you're wondering, through the years we've hidden our own children's shoes, too. After all, who couldn't use a little more luck?

Here's some more information about concealment shoes.

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words, Or Perhaps A Thousand Pictures

The Library of Congress is putting a million public domain images on Flickr, and they need your help:

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to show how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer. You're invited to help describe photographs in the Library of Congress' collection on Flickr, by adding tags or leaving comments. (Via Drawn!)

Here's a link to the Library's Prints & Photographs Online Catalog-- they're not all in the public domain, but would be great for sparking story ideas or as photo-reference for illustrations, no?

Things That Make You Go "Ahh"

The work of art moves you like a sailboat heading into the wind; you move forward only by tacking back and forth.
– Eric Booth, The Everyday Work of Art