The Things We Do For Love...

It definitely pays to be married to a creative person with a Type-A personality...

Recently, I was asked about copyright for images. While I do have them, I need something more for my website. My first thought was, What better image to have than the brooch that sets Brianagh on her journey, thus setting off the entire Time Passage series?!

I have lots of great first thoughts. Sometimes I'll come up with a second thought, but usually this is a waste of time, as I tend to stick with the first. I don't really know why; it's -- never mind, this isn't important for this post. Back to what I was trying to tell you before I interrupted myself.

So - brooch - great idea, right?! Now, if I only knew how to draw (anything)...

My incredibly talented husband worked all afternoon and night on things for my books - a redesign of my webpage (he's getting to be quite the whiz at web design!) and drawing this brooch. He's got mad illustrator skills (can I use that terminology if I'm over 18?) - check out his BLOG! - and his art hangs all over our house. I have full confidence in everything he creates - he really is that good.

But what he's creating this time is a bit different...it's something from my head, that came to me in a dream about 9 years ago. I've always been able to see it clearly in my mind - however, I can't draw a stick figure to save my life. I still don't know what colors make purple, and I certainly don't know what colors "go" together. I rely on him for these bits of knowledge.

After a bumbling explanation of what I imagined this brooch to be (seriously, there were many "kinda like"s and "actually, it's more like"s in that discussion than were strictly necessary), he sat down with a sketch pad (it was actually some sort of cool sheer-ish paper with a small pencil and crazy good eraser) and I went off to put more words on paper. A few minutes later (OK, it could have been a lot longer, I usually lose track of time when writing), he called me out and I stared at what he created.

It was just about perfect.

And, the thing is...it wasn't what I described. Well, it was, but it was so much better. He took my original idea (which he clearly understood; he read the whole first book a few years back when I first wrote it, and again today when I was prepping it for submission to an agent - more on that later) and recreated it into a beautiful rendering of what I would have imagined, had I been capable of imagining something that awesome.

It'll be splashed all over my website in the coming weeks, so you'll get to see it firsthand.