And we're off!

Hello out there!

I'll start with a short (maybe-- brief isn't my strong suit) introduction and information on what to expect from this blog.

If you want to see my Goodreads posts up to this point, go here: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8198362.Krista_Gossett/blog

I'm Krista Gossett, a newly published author and illustrator.  I'm not the conventional sort that follows the beaten path.  The most I ever published was some poetry (on Poetry.com) and I'm not in any writer's groups.  I've had a few English teachers gush over my creative writing and the usual accolades from friends and family.  I'm fiercely independent when it comes to working creatively.  In fact, against all good advice, I not only wrote, I edited, designed, illustrated, formatted, and self-published.

Let me defend those actions since, to some people, it seems like an impossible feat that anything worthwhile could come of this.  I studied graphic design in college for four years, getting both an associate's and a bachelor's.  Before that, I was one of those kids that always found her way onto a computer.  My experience with digital design goes as far back as the late 90s, but I went to school to refine those talents with teachers who were either formerly or actively still in the design industry.  I even managed to impress a few of them enough to use my work in future classes.  My art is not amazing by realistic standards, but it is a style I truly love doing.  I have done realism and, like a great deal of artists, found that branching out to surrealism and cultivating my own style was what I truly wanted.  My book covers will not follow the trends, but they will be true to my work.

As for writing, I absolutely hated everything I ever wrote prior to around 2005.  I had a talent for short stories and poetry, but I wrote far more that ended up in a wastebasket.  You couldn't convince me to share anything I've accidentally kept over the years.  In fact, it would end up destroyed if I were to find it.  Writing is not some new whim, but I was not very generous about sharing it.  I was extremely critical.  In fact, the story that I ended up publishing had started out as about 30 pages, the most I had ever written for one story.  This was right around the time I still hated most of the things I wrote.  It ended up shoved on a CD and I forgot about it for a few years.  I kept finding the disc on some random room raid and I'd pop it in, decide it was kind of interesting and add a little more.

About five years ago, I found the story that wouldn't die again.  I full-on cringed at the dialogue but realized the story itself had real promise.  So I completely overhauled it on an edit and couldn't put it down.  If you're doing any math, this means that I wrote the nine books inspired by this world over the course of 5 years.  2 of those years I was finishing school and working part-time and was able to finish the first three books.  I can't tell you how many times I went back to edit them even after I thought they were squared away, just because I couldn't believe I actually wrote something I love.  The last three years?  It was full time plus overtime, all I could eat, sleep and breathe.  I would bounce around on them, editing one then going back to another.  Sometimes I would step away for a long while and write other stories (some will also be novels eventually), but I would come back, full expecting to hate them and be drawn in all over again.

I know that artists can tend to be myopic and not see their flaws.  I have always been forthright about mine, working my ass off to be objective and not just skilled, but utilizing actual talent.  This wasn't something that I just decided would be fun.  Undoubtedly it CAN be, but if I wanted to make things easier for myself, I would have gone into forensic science.  I aced my science classes in high school even though I failed everything else.  In fact, I would go to first period science then skip school the rest of the day.  Science was my sweet bitch, but she just didn't speak to me like art.

Yeah, that part about keeping things short was put to the test and the lie detector has determined that that was a lie...

Back to college though.  I wasn't the bare minimum student.  I was the student that actually wrote a paper on how hexadecimal color works for RGB.  For those who don't understand, hexadecimal basically means 15 and RGB, is red/green/blue which makes up every color a computer can display. Skip ahead to the next paragraph if the technobabble scares you but I'll sum it up.  Every web color has a six digit signature with black being the lowest value at #000000 and white being the highest at #ffffff.  What's with the letters?  Well, zero through nine are self-explanatory values, but to make the signature contain 6 digits, the numbers up to fifteen are expressed with letter. 10 is a, 11 is b, and so on up to 15 being f.  If you type in these values, you'll see firsthand how the digital palette mixes to form the right colors.  For example, if you want the absolutely most obnoxious forms or red, green and blue available?  You're looking at the codes #ff0000, #00ff00, and #0000ff.  You're maximizing the combinations by placing f's in that color slot.  You already know that red and green paint mixed together in any art class you've ever taken results in an unappetizing shade of brown.  Brown is a dark shade of yellow, so there is your most obnoxious form of yellow #ffff00. Purple is your last obnoxious combo.  There are obnoxious oranges, but this is not a maximum value since you actually drop the green value to create oranges...   And true greys?  Those are created by plugging in the same value in every color coordinate like #7c7c7c. Since black and white are uniform, anything other than a level rise or fall is no longer greyscale, but officially a color. That being said, this is a terrific way to get that signature color, once you understand the basics of the system.  The paper I wrote was much wordier.  I'd love to share it at a later time, if I peaked your interest...

Anyway, yeah, I did that for fun.  No points, I just noticed a few students struggling with it and it set everyone straight.

Let me reassure you, whether or not I project the confidence, I am the consummate professional.  Where design is concerned, I know it inside and out, although I could give fuck-all about trends.  I don't freelance, for that very reason.  Clients want trends, trends sell, but I'd rather work intuitively, make something that I'm not ashamed of years down the line because cutting edge became corny.  I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a trendsetter, but I like to think I design for the work.  Sure, I love to take risks, but I don't do it simply for the sake of taking risks.  I want to deliver something timeless, something that speaks to people honestly.  I don't want to 'market' or 'sell', I want to encourage people to discover what I do with the same magic I discovered my affinities in life.

I know there's this general perception that spreading yourself too thin makes you a master of nothing.  I couldn't disagree more.  Creatively, I think that jumping around only enhances each area.  While I clearly wouldn't take on animating a 3D movie all by myself, there are still a lot of projects that aren't impossible to take on alone. (Speaking from experience though, the cheesy 6 second short I did in college took one month to complete and it is still flawed and rough).  To break it down for you, I had to learn Clip Studio Paint Pro to make use of some of their unique brushes and comic book tones.  With prior digital experience, it still took me a couple of weeks to learn and a couple of months to master (using that word loosely since there is always more to learn). The cover art takes me a few days to do by itself, but since it's the first thing you see, it warrants a little more attention.  Each drawing I do, in fact, has a general time frame.  Penciling takes me about 10-30 minutes.  Inking takes me an hour or two.  Scanning in a batch of drawings, cropping and naming them generally takes about 3-4 hours.  I then do a clean-up process where I remove any black spots that didn't go away with scan settings, then remove all of the white and preserve the lines.  This takes about 10-30 minutes per drawing.  If I want to smooth the lines (sometimes I love the rougher look), I pop them into illustrator and do an Image Trace to vectorize and edit the lines.  This can be really quick, just a couple of minutes or take up to a half hour, depending on what I'm going for.  From there, it becomes a layer in Clip Studio Paint.  Color basing (whether done in color or black and white) takes about an hours and a half to two hours.  This is where I just fill everything with a basic color and/or texture.  This is when I finally get around to the final step, detailing.  The time frame on this wildly varies, but suffice to say I can generally do 3-5 drawings in an 8-10 hour day.  Now, keep in mind that my books contain no fewer than 30 drawings but closer to 40+.  Now you see why it takes me a couple of busy months to illustrate.

And why bother?  People will generally read the books OR want to see the pictures.  Well, it's just vanity, plain and simple.  I wanted a way to improve as an illustrator and I wanted my playground to be a world I had grown to love despite my initial skepticism that I could.  And THIS is my primary reason for self-publishing.  Agents want a writer.  Publishers want to keep cost down and profit up.  It wasn't fear of rejection-- I just fought through several deaths of loved ones in recent years and instead of wallowing in grief, I kicked my ass into gear.  I believe in my work, for fuck's sake,  and for once I actually couldn't care less if I was rejected 100 times over, but I was determined to do this my way.

Let's be clear.  Just because someone says you 'can't' or 'shouldn't' doesn't mean you have to listen.  A dear friend of mine once told me that humanity is like a crab tank.  Everyone loves you when you're content with hanging out on the bottom, but the minute they see you swimming for the surface, they grab you by your ankle and pull you back down.  Only a small handful of people actually support you and many will tell you that you should get paid for what you do.  Usually, zero of those people will actually pay anything for your work when push comes to shove.  This is just how it works.  Your audience just isn't going to be your longtime social networking friends.  You might have a few dear friends and family that pull for you right out of the gate.  Some of my friends are struggling to make ends meet but still give me valuable moral support in lieu of a sale.  Some will only join up when you gain popularity.  Some will keep snapping at your ankles, maybe patting you on the back publicly but messaging to others that they don't get what all the fuss is about.  If you've ever tried to lose weight or better yourself, this is nothing new to you, but don't get discouraged.  It's not that these people are real or fake (and I wish society as a whole would stop simplifying people with those shitty words), it's sometimes about their own insecurities or the fear that you will reject them as inferior.  People aren't fake because you radically changed.  If these people are important, take the time to reassure them but you may have to be a little cutthroat if they demand more than you can give.  My advice: part ways, don't burn bridges.  Give people time to miss you and miss them a bit too.

I decided to give you a nice long intro and if you're a reader and stuck with me, I think we'll get along just fine.  I love to let my muse wander when I blog.  The point is?  Defy convention!  Be prepared to sacrifice security and popularity.  Let people look down their noses at you about what genres you use or how much you can afford to pay.  Don't let people tell you that outsourcing is the only way to ensure quality if, like me, you paid in time and hustle.  There are always going to be get-rich-quick schemes, fake books, purists, genre confusion, etc. tripping you up.  Define yourself and build your audience honestly.  I'm going to tell you now-- one book is going to be hard to sell.  Even if you went the conventional route and trusted beta readers to build a fanbase.  In today's market, you may have to publish many times over to be able to call it a stable career.  I can't stress enough how important it has been to me to be a clever promoter...  And since I have a whole blog post for that topic alone, I'll leave this post at that.

Advice, good or not, is just that: advice.  Plan intuitively, think realistically, and write your ass off.