Sunday Update - The Well-Stocked Pantry and Geneaology

I think that, technically, I made my goal this half week.  No I didn't upload any new covers.  (More about that below.)  But I did upload 18 images to a stock site.  And I've got bunches more to upload - but it's a slow process at first.  (And they take forever to moderate the files.  Well, four days, but that's forever in Artiste terms.)

I was puzzled for a while about why the sudden slow down in producing new covers.  I have been producing 2-3 a day for over a month, and then, suddenly, I couldn't quite get to done.

Well, I figured it out.  I tend to work creatively in two modes.  I tend to either be producing lots of off-the-cuff parts of pictures -- backgrounds, shapes, sketches, etc. -- or I am putting together a great design based on those things.  And even though I'm going back and forth in any session, I do tend to lean toward one mode or the other. And for the past couple months I've been working off a large pool of unfinished art.

It's been like cooking with a full and varied pantry.  An art pantry, full of personal "stock art."  And now I've run out of yeast and flour.  Still have plenty of cocoa and sugar and milk, and a freezer full of pork chops, spices and lime juice, but no butter either.

So I'm restocking.

And now that I see it that way, I realize I should be selling stock art at stock sites. Because when I'm in "restocking" mode, I can paint up a storm on dingbats and backgrounds and silhouettes, etc.

In the meantime, I am slowly formatting Moon Child: Ready or Not for Wattpad, and I am digging into my family history stuff.  (I am writing a family history. Or researching the family in order to write it.)

I am deeply embroiled in researching a great great aunt who married above most of the family -- a DOCTOR and PROFESSOR! -- but who died in childbirth so nobody actually talked about her when I was young.  Her husband came from the same county in New York where her mother came from, and I am wondering if it was the family matchmakers at work, or if they happened across each other because she was a nurse.

As a result, I am currently scouring all the issues of the Benzie Banner from 1915 and finding all sorts of other interesting threads.

I am reminded of a sweet little barn cat I knew.  Her name was Gub Gub, and one day when she was half grown, and a big snow had caused a delay in the catfood delivery, I watched her set out from the barn in a determined and business-like way, as if she were dead-set on catching a squirrel. Except as she trotted along, little bits of snow flew away from her paws, and, well, she had to stop and pounce on them. And that stirred up more little ripples of snow, and she had to pounce on that too.  We ended up with little cat paw prints all over the area in front of the barn, but no rodents died that day of anything but the weather.  (We did get the catfood in an hour later...)

Anyway, that's geneaology. You are headed out to do one thing, and there are a million tantalizing things that crop up and distract you.  (Besides, you CAN'T write the history until you've tracked down that one more important thing.)

(Edited to add this picture of GubGub -- not the best one I have, but the best I could find on short notice.)

See you in the funny papers.