Be Creative-now climb into one of these boxes…

How is your week going? Good, I hope.

Are you a Creative? An artist, poet, musician, or a writer? “Creative” is a pretty big sandpile to play in, so I don’t feel too bad asking the question. But then every Creative I know also needs to eat and pay the rent, just like everyone else. When we Creatives launch out to make money to in order to keep body and soul together, we enter a whole ‘nother world; a world of much smaller boxes- into one of which you must now crawl.

Since I write and illustrate books, need to eat now and then and pay the rent with monotonous regularity, I need to crawl into a box…but I can’t find the box!

“I need an agent,” I thought, so I went seeking agents. Guess what? They want you to include your box in the initial contact letter. Here is a typical “What we’re looking for:”

“Adult, middle grade, and young adult fiction (romance, horror, fantasy, realistic, light sci-fi, and graphic novels). Literary fiction with a commercial bent” Gee, if I was bent at all in a commercial direction, I probably wouldn’t need an agent.

I told myself, “OK, self, just pick a box.” Can sci-fi include a story set in the past? Is archaeology a sci that can be “fied?” Probably not. Wait-What was Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn? That’s the box I’m looking for. Fiction. Satire? Adventure? Middle grade? Young adult? Adult? The jury’s still out on Mark Twain’s genre and I wonder if we ever would have heard of him if he were writing now and had to crawl into a box. I suspect he would have found that hilarious.

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“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

“Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.”
― Mark Twain

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PS>They also wanted a head shot, like from a professional photographer. But this one my daughter snapped with her phone captures my essential wise-arsed-ness splendidly and will have to do.