Today’s artwork: The Patron Saint of Crusty Paint Brushes, a custom piece for one of my Patreon patrons. This is what happens when you say, “oh, I’lll like whatever you create” to me, and let me do whatever I want. You have been warned.
On my work table today is Colleen’s artistic quotes book from our A Year of Altered Books round robin. It’s due to mail out again on Friday, so naturally, I’m doing the second set of pages today. I always seem to do one set as soon as I get a book, and then the rest in the last couple of days before it mails out again. There’s my Libran need for balance showing again.
So, the previous entry on My Weekly Thing was all about Amanda Palmer’s book, and my art, and how the two seem to be running on the same track. I tweeted the link to it when it was finished, just like always, but I tagged Amanda in the tweet. Here’s the result:
Is it wrong that I sort of went a little fan girl, and squeed a bit when this appeared? Follow along here, because I’m going to connect the next few dots back to this…
I get a lot of what could be referred to as fan mail. People email me, and tell me all sorts of things, some of which are over-the-top compliments about my work, or my how-to lessons, or my videos, or whatever. Stuff that I sort of take for granted. I upload one or two things every week, and eventually, they end up being quite the big pile. It’s not so impressive one or two at a time, but over fifteen years, well, to someone just finding me, it’s a lot.
Anyway, people email me, and in among their life stories and descriptions of where they live and what they’re working on right now, they say lots of nice things about me, and embarrassing things, like how wonderful or talented or generous I am. I might be one of those things occasionally, but I’m rarely all of them all the time, so I feel sort of weird reading those emails, because they make me wonder who the real recipient is supposed to be. I never know how to answer them, so they sort of lay there in my inbox, until I just delete them, unanswered.
As it happens, one was sitting in my inbox when I posted about Amanda’s book, and got that tweet that made me all feel all warm and happy. It was just one word, but it meant a lot that someone I admire saw what I wrote, and responded. So, I jumped over to my inbox, and answered the email that had been sitting there, staring at me, telling the person who wrote it about this experience, and how it taught me that it doesn’t matter how I respond to emails like hers—only that I say something to acknowledge I saw it.
So, hello, all you people who have emailed me previously, and received nothing in return, because I didn’t know what to say to you. I saw your message. Thanks for writing.
I see you.