This piece was written ‘offline’ during my May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust Creative Time Fellowship. It’s an incredible program for any author or illustrator working in children’s literature in Australia.

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It’s easy to make stuff for others. To assess the market (or landscape), identify the need, then make something to address that need. What’s that you say? Publishers are looking for more stories about the changing nature of masculinity and children’s identity? Great. Here’s a story for that.

That’s one way of making stuff.

The other way of making stuff is to look inwards – assess your internal fears, anxieties, and interests, and then make something to address that need. Solve your own problem. For me, one of those is dealing with the existential issues around human’s perceived separation from nature.

The first way of making stuff is likely to be more profitable; maybe you’ll get published, maybe someone will pay you for the answer you’ve provided to their need. It’s much less likely that someone will pay you for the second way – solving a problem for yourself that no one else but you asked for.

Money is one way of measuring success. It has a fast, sharp, dopamine hit. It feels like you’ve achieved something. The money and contract is a quantitative representation of that ‘success’. But, learning more about who you are in this world, and what you want to become? That doesn’t make it to a profit/loss statement or a balance sheet. For that work, we need a different set of measurements; measurements that are more complex than a number in a table cell. And, there are no standards for this sort of measurement. It’s different for everyone. No one can give the answer to you but yourself – but that’s also what makes it far more valuable than money or status. It’s about playing the infinite game, not the finite one.

This piece was written ‘offline’ during my May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust Creative Time Fellowship. It’s an incredible program for any author or illustrator working in children’s literature in Australia.

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It’s taken 3 or 4 days of ‘nothing’, but something has arrived.

I was quietly panicking about my time in Adelaide leading up to this month – 4 weeks, alone, with nothing but my own stupid brain. Would I have an idea? Would I make anything? Or would I flounder about and spend 4 weeks having a ‘holiday’ with nothing to show for it.

Well, week one’s lesson is a profound reminder that nothing is something. And nothing, most of the time, is scary. That’s why we avoid it like the plague. It’s far easier to fill ‘empty’ moments with all the ways that have been habituated in regular life – browse instagram, put the washing on, check emails etc.

Humans are, mostly, responding to their immediate environment. And so it’s only when regular life changes overnight (through something like travel) that we’re presented with a refreshed possibility of changing our habits. When I landed in Adelaide I turned off Instagram, I quit caffeine, I invested in my bodily health through things like massage. In my day-to-day life, I would’ve said “I’ve started to do nothing.” And then, of course, as nothing has a tendancy to do – it created ‘something’.

In fact, I always knew this, but somehow, just forgot about it. I’ve written about it time and time again – we fill the space we create for ourselves but creating the space is the difficult bit. The start of this fellowship is a good reminder, especially after an intense series of world-shaking events like a global pandemic, that going back to first principles to get in touch with what lays below the surface-level mind is always worth doing.

Honestly, I don’t get publishing. At least not in Australia, anyway. When I look at some of the picture books I enjoy that are published by non-Australian publishers, I’m jealous. They seem to have a different appetite for risk. They are edgy, contemporary, interesting and relevant to the way I perceive the world.

As I’ve written before, picture books are one of the last spaces we have for intergenerational discussion – a carer/parent and a child, seated together, engaging in a story. It’s such a ripe medium for helping the older ones and the younger ones bridge some important gaps; gender identity, disability, our relationship to the natural environment, the changing nature of masculinity, the value of indigenous culture and knowledge, and emotional intelligence around things like neurodiversity.

But, when I look around at the Australian publishing landscape, I see very (and I mean very) few of these books that aren’t didactic. Anything trying to address these concepts are grounded in ‘safety’ and I can imagine the conversations around the editing table – “we mustn’t exclude anyone if this is to be a book about ‘diversity’”, or, “stories about disability can only be written by people with lived experiences.” That last one actually happened to me, by the way.

And I get it, the last thing a dying industry like publishing needs is an unpopular or controversial book out in the marketplace. No one wants to be the one who is criticized for ‘not taking an inclusive approach to writing about historically marginalised groups.’ or, as more colloquially, “not reading the room.”

Publishers also need to make money – I get that. And the risk of a book that doesn’t ‘tick all the boxes’ because it’s too focussed on one particular disability or ethnicity is perceived to be large. In the end, it’s easy for me to criticise from the sidelines because it’s not my money.

I heard on the radio that films are being ‘designed’ for inattention these days – that the visual component is being ‘explained’ so that people can still ‘watch’ a movie whilst doing things like glancing at their phone occassionally.

But what seems obvious to me is that, in the long run, by taking this cautious approach underpinned by a fear of offending or excluding someone, we’ll lose. I can’t help but feel that, as a culture, we’re losing our grasp on the value of fiction – a made-up way to explore things that are meaningful to us so we can learn and adapt them to our own lives. What I’m seeing more and more, especially around these issues which publishers in Australia seem scared to touch, is non-fiction – it borders on instruction.

The thing is, humans operate better with stories, not books of facts. It’s something our indigenous people have been using for 60,000+ years and there’s hundreds of years of science to back it up. We remember a story much more readily than we remember a fact. We create characters so that our readers can become those characters. If a reader becomes that character, they feel what that character feels. It activates a different part of our brain and our entire nervous system so that the journey a reader takes is embodied in them. That journey of a character – through conflict and out the other side – is how we embody learning with every part of our being. This is different from a ‘distant’ reading of a book about ‘all the ways to be diverse’ or some other flavour of it where, it seems, the goal is for any child to find one page or drawing where someone like them is represented.

In a world of independent content creation, publishers will begin to struggle – they are now competing with YouTube, independent presses, and even individuals who, more than ever, can afford a print run. Publishers still own the distribution channel but how long will that last? The drones are coming.

Some of the most compelling and mind-changing stories I’ve read in adult fiction have been about people who aren’t like me (muslim, female, queer), written by people who also aren’t like their characters. They’ve done deep and empathetic research into their characters’ lives and have spent the time and energy to build a bridge between their experience and the experience of the people and groups whom they write.

There is an internal transformation that I experience when reading books that have that focus that I cannot get from any other medium (except for maybe movies). Do we think that children aren’t ‘mature’ enough to have this? Talk to any publisher or parent and they’ll always tell you that kids are smarter than we give them credit for – maybe it’s time a few ‘courageous’ Australian publishers start meeting their young readers where they are? The alternative seems worse.

There are times when the art practice needs to take a back seat. Maybe it’s that work is overwhelming, or the kids need more attention than usual, or someone close to us needs an extra level of care beyond normal. Like, right now, I’m working 3 jobs at once. I love that work, deeply, but it’s not art. So it’s easy to think that work is ‘taking over’, that I’m losing my motivation or inspiration for making art. But, it seems, the opposite may be true.

Life, like art, isn’t static. In fact, they feed each other. The experiences we have in life fuel the personal exploration of answers to questions no one asked of us. In fact, without life, art may be impossible.

So, sometimes, life has to take priority, and instead of fighting it, the best thing to do is embrace it. Those intense periods of work, the kids, or caring for others will eventually subside and the space to create art once again do eventually appear it’s just that now, we may have something more to say because we’ve lived a little in between.

It used to be that publishers were the only ones who could ‘publish’ a book. That’s when publishing meant commissioning it, editing it, making it, distributing it, and selling it.

But now, the editing and making parts aren’t the difficult bit. In fact, anyone with a few hundred dollars and an entrepreneurial spirit can fill their garage with 10,000 copies of professionally printed and edited work of their own.

The difficult bit these days is selling it – not just for the individual, but for the publisher, too.

Right now, publishers still have relationships with large retailers (think Big W, Target, and Dymocks) and schools in Australia. That mattered more when people shopped in-store. But, as more and more of our purchasing happens online, reaching readers (and buyers) is getting more difficult. No longer are publishers competing with other publishers for the limited shelf space in these retail channels, they’re competing with big tech – algorithms that drive visibility of their books in places where people ‘go’ – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and so on.

As the addictive design of social media creates the new ‘shopping mall’, and the advertisements in that shopping mall go to the highest bidder, it’s becoming more difficult for publishers to find and therefore sell the books they commission. Is it any wonder they’re falling back on celebrities as a way to find an audience?

Self-publishing – or let’s call it ‘self-marketing’ now (because that’s what it really is) – isn’t impossible; as individuals, we have more agency than ever before, but it’s still a hard slog. When an individual is competing with the marketing budgets of the big publishers as well as every other retailer on the internet, the role of the ‘publisher’ still gives a creator their best chance of reaching an audience. For how much longer? Well, that’s anyone’s guess.

Celebrity books (books written by celebrities, especially in children’s literature) divide people. They divide readers, they divide ‘real’ authors and illustrators. But, like with any shift in culture, there are pros and cons to celebrities penning picture books.

If you’ve benefited from one as a creator (full disclosure, I have, in fact, 2 now), you’re likely to think they have a net positive impact. But, if you feel as though you can’t get published because celebrities keep “taking up the available space”, you may be a little bitter.

Here are a few unstructured thoughts about the role of celebrity books, or, at least, what I think is true right now.

Celebrity books extend reach

If a celebrity putting their name on a book, whether they actually write it or not, gets a book into a home or in front of a child that has never read a book before (or otherwise wouldn’t) then I am all for it. Meghan Markle’s book got slammed by some reviewers, but, you know, it’s also true that reviews don’t really matter. And, if just one kid got access to a book because it was Meghan’s, then I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. Judging one’s taste in books is unhelpful and it’s OK for people to like whatever they want.

Publishers struggle with marketing and celebrities are helpfu

Let’s be frank – marketing books is difficult. If it wasn’t there’d be plenty more self-published authors out there with huge audiences. In fact, I’d say that publishers aren’t really in the game of ‘publishing’ anymore – it’s actually about distribution and marketing.

It’s not that publishers don’t know how to do it (although some understand it better than others) but, just like any individual who is trying to get their work out there, publishers need to fight and/or use algorithms designed to hide and/or show things from certain people. Those algorithms change constantly and there’s no transparency around that so it’s a game where, eventually, big tech wins. Publishers, like any click-bait media company, also need to compete with a messy 24-hours news cycle, an increasingly divided audience attention, new channels like TikTok, the list goes on.

Engaging celebrities to write their own books allows publishers to outsource some of the marketing to those people who have amassed captive audiences on all the marketing channels already. This leads to the first point: It gets books in front of people who may not necessarily read in the first place.

Many celebrities are writers

Many celebrities are indeed writers. They may not have written for children necessarily, but they are often celebrities because they’ve written before – comedy, music, film, tv – and that work has been successful; it’s connected with an audience. Does that mean they can’t write for children? And, do they write their own children’s books from scratch? I suspect it’s a spectrum. Do ‘real’ authors write their own? I know some ‘real’ authors who are heavily edited, and I know some who aren’t. Does the amount of editing and hand-holding that may go into a celebrity book make it illegitimate? And then, like with any writer who’s writing for a new audience, sometimes they need help (all editors help all ‘real’ writers anyway). Should they be denied that?

Celebrities block ‘diversity’?

And so, this is a tricky one, but I’m not sure anyone knows if it’s true that we have fewer voices from historically-discriminated-against communities because of a publishers’ propensity to publish celebrities. Yes, there is historical discrimination in our media landscape. That’s been proved time and time again. But, the representation of voices from historically-discriminated-against backgrounds is improving. Maybe not as quickly as anyone would like, but it is. And so, should only white male celebrities be prevented the opportunity to write and market a book to their audience for a while? If Oprah wrote a children’s book, is that OK?

This line of thinking is nuanced and complex. But, if those diversity advocates value true diversity, then ‘real’ authors and ‘celebrity’ authors of any race, gender, and sexuality (whilst being mindful of the historical discrimination of marginalised groups’ voices) should sit side by side on the shelf. Again, who are we to judge what someone should or shouldn’t read? Maybe, just maybe, celebrity books aren’t blocking new voices, but making room for them? This brings me to my next point.

Celebrity books may make more room for unpublished authors

If a publisher’s goal is revenue (and let’s be a clear, a publisher can’t exist without that), then managing risk is important. Publishers tend to do this through a common mechanism used by any business, diversification.

Bear with me on this one.

A publisher could publish only one hundred cookbooks in a year, or, they can publish broadly – novels, YA, kids etc. The rules of diversification basically state that the second way is a better way to manage risk.

What celebrity books can bring to publishers is a surer bet – like picking a favourite in a horse race. Celebrities, because of their audience, are more likely to sell more books than someone who isn’t. It doesn’t always work out this way, but nothing is certain in publishing, anyway. However, if publishers have the opportunity to place some surer bets, it means that they’re more able to take risks elsewhere. What sort of risk are we talking about? New authors and illustrators from historically discriminated against backgrounds – people whose voices have not been heard before. Now, I’m not in publishing, so I don’t know if that’s actually happening, but it’s certainly possible. The optimist within me hopes it’s true. I’d love to know from publishers whether they’re being this strategic. I suspect, like always, it’s a spectrum; both across publishers and time.

What’s a real author anyway?

I’m not here to defend ‘celebrity’ authors (ok, I am a little bit). But, in the end, anyone can write a great story, and anyone can write a terrible one. Books written by “Real authors” and “Celebrity authors” aren’t mutually exclusive, nor are they a true signal of a good or bad story.

What I know is that giving kids (and adults) access to a wide variety of stories and styles of illustration and art are important. Kids, like adults, have a huge variety of likes and dislikes. A ‘celebrity’ book that an adult may roll their eyes at might just be the one that unlocks a love of books and reading for a child.

I’m not sure why would anyone get in the way of that.

I think I’m addicted to steep learning curves. What does that mean? Well, it means I derive huge amounts of energy (probably dopamine hits) from the process of going from knowing nothing about something, to knowing everything.

When I first started work in storytelling for picture books, it’s fair to say I knew nothing – knew nothing about kids, knew nothing (formally) about storytelling, knew nothing about publishing. That’s a lot of nothing to know, but I think it’s for precisely this reason that I’ve enjoyed it so much. The learning curve staring me in the face when I said yes to those first contracts was vertical.

And so, 8 years on from that point, I know a lot more. About all of the things I’ve mentioned above, but also about myself. My ‘journey’ began with making a picture book but what I’ve realised is that the broader field of ‘visual storytelling’ is where I’m finding great joy now (and, still, the learning curve is steep).

By this point, I thought I’d be bored (it’s happened throughout my working career), but instead, I’m finding myself infinitely interested in what’s next; and I’m changing as I go. Ink is playing a larger role in my work than it was 8 years ago (when I was mostly learning off the internet from fine watercolour artists who said things like, ‘never show your lines’). My use of colour – one of the most infinitely complex materials a visual storyteller has at their disposal – is moving forwards, too. So too is my drawing as I only just begin to learn that illustration is more than about illuminating text or drawing the familiar.

Of course, the risk of being addicted to steep learning curves is that we begin to spread ourselves too thin. Once I’ve done watercolour for a few years, maybe I’ll drop that and try sculpture? Or, I know nothing about how to bake bread, maybe I’ll ‘master’ that, next? Cooking, crafts, art, trades – the list of what we could be doing with our time is endless. The question becomes, what’s it for and why?

I recently read a quote that went something along these lines: “If you build 7 houses, one brick at a time, what you’ll get is 7 unfinished houses. It’s better to focus on getting one house complete.” And whilst this tries to reckon with the idea of chasing steep learning curves instead of persisting with ‘one’ path, what it doesn’t account for is why the person is doing it in the first place.

For me, I’m interested in visual storytelling so why shouldn’t I build a village of half finished houses? Each brick I lay at a different site helps me lay the next brick at a different site even better. At this moment, I don’t feel qualified to be building anyone a house, I’m seeking to learn what it takes to build a village on strong foundations. If I don’t finish the houses, that’s OK, someone else will no doubt be coming up behind me to keep working on the job.

There are plenty of reasons given, all over the internet, for what illustration is for. The historical one – it was for ‘illuminating’ text. The more modern ones – It’s for emphasising a message, adding a uniqueness to the ‘content’, it helps to convey an emotion.

And, whilst all of those things are true for illustration, they’re also true for video or photography – other image-making mediums. So, what makes ‘illustration’ different?

The one that sticks out to me most is that illustration isn’t constrained by the physical or material world. A photograph is often generated from pre-existing forms. And yes, they can be abstract ones, but the thing needs to exist in physical form for light to be able to bounce off it and hit the film or digital sensor in the camera to create the image. The same goes for video.

But illustration? Well, it’s bound only by human imagination. It’s difficult to get a photo of an ant doing a handstand, but it’s easy to draw. It’s difficult to get a video of an emu riding a bike, but it’s easy to draw. It’s difficult to get a photographic image of a unicorn and monkey playing cards in heaven, but, you guessed it, it’s easy to draw.

And so, if the limit of illustration is imagination and nothing else, then, as illustrators, we owe it to ourselves to cultivate that imaginary world. And how do we do that? Well, it’s proven that physical repetitive tasks work. Quiet time and ‘being bored’ works. Reading widely and seeking novel (and sometimes frightening) experiences works.

Writers can draw pictures in the mind with their words – and that is its own brand of magic. But, as they say, a picture says a thousand words and so words are not particularly efficient for describing images, most of the time.

Maybe, our job as illustrators, is to render the impossible so that others may use our cultivated, rich imaginations to cultivate their own. Imagine what’s possible if 7 billion humans start to imagine their own never before imagined universes. What might that mean for us and our species? For those of us who can contribute, that duty beckons.

For me, the worst part of the illustration process is the bit where I have no choice but to interact with a computer. Mostly, that happens when I’ve finished all the artwork for a book and I need to take photos to share them with the publisher.

Maybe it’s partly because I want to take really good photos. After all, this is the first time a publisher will experience the images I’ve spent months labouring over. To take a few phone snaps in bad lighting, to me, doesn’t feel like the best way to present that work. What I want is for the publisher to gasp, grin, and fall over with delight. To maximise the publishers’ emotional response in that way requires more.

And so, for years, I’ve been snapping away, on auto-mode, with a pretty decent SLR, trying to get the best result I can. But, I’ve never been able to get it right – the colours aren’t vivid or correct enough, the image is never quite straight on, the exposure isn’t consistent. I didn’t want to invest in really complex setups (professional lighting rigs etc) just for a few photos. Surely there were cheaper and more space-saving alternatives. Surely!

Recently (and completely unrelated to the problems I had with taking photos of my art), I bought a 35mm film SLR camera for a new hobby and started learning how cameras work – shutter speed, aperture, iso – what each of them control and how they work together to make interesting images. I’ve always loved cinema and visual storytelling but never had the opportunity or means to learn what underlies it all – photography.

I found a cheap 35mm film SLR camera on eBay, and purchased a few rolls of black and white film. I wandered the local streets taking snaps of what I thought was interesting and recording my settings along the way so that, when I got the photos back, I could see where I went wrong (or, hopefully, right).

I haven’t yet had a roll of film developed but, about 30 days in to this experiment, I finished a book which meant, you guessed it, time to take photos of my artwork. Urgh.

But, something has changed. This time, the process went smoothly. Things are well-lit, in focus, and, well, pretty damn good. It took about half the time it normally takes for me to do this part of the process and the results are at least twice as good.

So now, as I write this, it all seems so obvious but it wasn’t at the time – if you don’t like something, it may just be because you don’t know enough about it. I experienced this, first hand, with taking photos of my artwork, but looking back on other aspects of my life, it’s always been the same; classical music, poetry, ballet and contemporary dance, even american sports; once you understand the rules (or, at the very least, the general concepts and context of the activity), the more able you are to appreciate it and, perhaps, even enjoy it.

I wonder if there’s anyone else out there for whom this may be true, or perhaps it’s something holding them back from trying something new. Maybe it’s not that we don’t like something, it’s just that we don’t understand it yet.

I’ve recently produced images that, I believe, are some of the best I’ve ever produced. There’s only one problem – I broke some rules on the way there.

See, I’m a self-taught watercolourist. What does that mean? Well, I never went to art school, or got any significant in-person or ‘formal’ help toward improving my watercolour skills. I watched a lot of YouTube. I read a lot of books. I studied the great ‘masters’ and attended some local workshops. I also painted. A lot.

But, one thing that happens when the internet is your primary teacher is that it’s good at reinforcing itself. It only takes one ‘expert’ to give a ‘cardinal rule of watercolour’ on the internet and each and every pretender then passes on the same ‘wisdom’. For a communication medium that was supposed to be about accessing a diversity of voices, the internet doesn’t do a great job of it.

Here are some of the cardinal rules of watercolour that I’ve seen in multiple places on the internet:

1. Never use paint straight out the tube, always mix it with a little bit of its complementary colour
2. Never use fugitive pigments
3. Never use white – leave it unpainted, instead.
4. Only use watercolour – never gouache. Gouache is cheating.
5. You only need 12 colours, just learn to mix everything else.
6. Never clean your palette, the ‘mud’ will help soften colours.
7. Don’t ‘draw’ with pencil. Mark up your composition but let the painting do the work
8. Use as few brushstrokes as possible

And the list goes on.

It’s not just watercolour either. These arbitrary rules exist in art in general (I’ve written about oil vs acrylic before). I’ve spent so many years trying to adhere to those rules, to push myself and the medium as far as it would take my imagination and I’ve enjoyed the process thoroughly. The constraints of watercolour are often not limiting, but helpful. So what happened? Well, my imagination simply saw things that watercolour alone couldn’t achieve.

If I stuck to those “never” and “should not” rules, I wouldn’t have created the images I’ve just created. Why? Because… wait for it… I used acrylic and watercolour together! That’s right. A cardinal sin in any ‘pure watercolourists’ bible. I also did light over dark (oh no! two rules broken). I used gouache, more than 12 pigments, and I used ink for my outlines. Yeah, that’s right, once the flood gates were open, the water came rushing out.

What I didn’t find in any YouTube video was that the medium is exactly that, the *medium* – the passive materials that we use on our way to realising something bigger. The medium itself doesn’t care if you combine it with chalky gouache or plasticised acrylic (let’s not even mention acryl-gouache!) All that matters is me, he artist, answer the question I’m seeking to answer for myself. It’s a bonus if the viewer has the same question, too, because that’s where connection is made.

In the end, there are far more ‘normal people’ than ‘art critics’. So, when someone stands in front of your work, chances are they’ll not even give the medium a second thought… or even a first thought. But, they *will* feel something.

The art critic standing next to them might scoff at your ‘mixed media’ approach, or how you’ve ‘debased the purity of the watercolour medium’ but to them I say this; the watercolour pigments we use these days were not always around, either. If I don’t use *actual* ochre, or have my assistant grind and mix the watercolour for me, on site, is it still pure? Would Turner agree? Would Cezanne?

So, I’ve decided, there are no rules. All we have are the materials available to us in the tiny moment in time in which we occupy the Earth. The goal is then to make the work our brains are asking us to make, by whatever medium/s necessary. It’s a net loss to our humanity, otherwise.