Some good publishing news today: The cover for The Glass Scientists Book 1 finally got approved--the sketch proposal, anyway! I am enormously relieved. It was a five-month journey to get to this point, combining two of my least favorite things in creative storytelling: A) marketing to current trends I am not remotely up-to-date on and B) brainstorming. I imagine the former sounds more distasteful on the surface, but I've been through TV development enough times to appreciate the merits of designing a product that quickly communicates its main selling points to its intended audiences.

Instead, the latter category ended up causing me the most problems. I have, and always have had, terrible trouble generating visual ideas. It's one of the main reasons I went into storyboarding and not character design. When asked, "Give me a bunch of fun options for this character's outfit!" or "Do a page exploring different shape language for this character?" My brain's kneejerk response is: "Why? The first one communicates the story goal. I want to move onto something else now, please."

I really dug myself in deep because I tried to compensate for my natural lack of interest in the subject by generating a massive number of designs, guaranteeing that I burned myself out after every round. On the very last round, I finally discovered that the process became a lot more bearable when I actually produced the number of designs requested rather than producing as many as physically possible--yet another sign that my family's mantra of, "If someone asks you to jump, don't ask how high; always jump as high as you can" is not the best advice in the world.