When I think about writing versus illustration it has occurred to me that they are, in a way, inverses of each other.

A well drawn picture is a moment in time. It catches your eye and then draws you in to look at all the little details. When done particularly well, it hints at

a story that may either be prologue to the image the artist painstakingly drew or an epilogue to something that was never illustrated, and only hinted at. That's another wonderful thing about illustration; so much of the story is strictly in the viewer's mind and you can have

multiple scenarios emerge out of the same picture depending on who gets to lend their voice to the piece.

A written story is almost the exact opposite. It's a BIG CHUNK OF TEXT that when viewed from afar looks a complete jumble. There's nothing to draw the reader in beyond a

promise of entertainment. Then, if the text does its job right, it draws the reader in with little bits of details and information spread throughout and the reader makes the image with their mind.

As for the moment in time, there's often far less subtlety in that. Every story,

has a beginning a middle and end, no matter how short. People can imagine what happened before and after they read the text, but it's not nearly as ambiguous towards its own narrative. There aren't nearly as many variations or interpretations of what happened or is going to

happy as looking at picture and drawing meaning. Similarly, though, writing can trick reader's mind into filling in the blanks for visual appearance. There are times when I have purposefully left physical descriptions vague and trusted the reader to envision things for

themselves. It doesn't always matter that so-and-so's a blonde or such-and-such is dressed like this. In stories it matters more in what they do and think and how they act and behave. Writing CAN give physical descriptions, but it isn't obligated to. Further more, when read-

ing Dahl, I really only needed to know what Willy Wonka looked like once and then I filled in the rest every time it said he did or said something. While an illustrator of that Chocolate factory is illustrating the scene, he has to make sure that Wonk and the other characters

LOOK the same every single time. And it's harder than it looks, trust me.

Yet, these two artforms are highly complimentary. A joy of working on Perpetual Change is knowing that my collaborator, Piece of Soap, is going to be animating and drawing all the characters and making

the pixels move about. People get drawn in by the logo Eclair sucking on a pacifier. And when I'm writing for it, I can just write "diaper change sequence" and then go and focus on the dialogue. Because Fiona and Eclair's hijinks look so good (and their faces so expressive)

that I can play to my dialogue strengths. I don't have to spend three paragraphs expressing what a room looks like or how a diaper feels to Eclair or what Karlton looks like or the expressions on their faces. Soap's drawings do all that lifting for me.

And so I can appreciate

the appeal of using visual art to accompany a story. A good picture can really draw things in. Can do some of the lifting for my narrative. Either people will look at the picture and go, "Oh I wonder what this story is!" Or will read my story and then look at the picture and

go "Oh! So THAT's what it looked like!". Regardless, the two become intertwined in a good way. It's win-win. It's peanut butter and chocolate.

Except when it's not.

It's win-win IF it's a collaboration. It's win-win IF it's a commission It's win-win IF AND ONLY IF the

creators of both text and image are in agreement with each other.

I put a lot of work in my writing. Visual artists put a lot of work into the pictures they draw. To deliberately take their image and post it with something you wrote implies that you've got some kind of

permission or some kind of quasi-ownership for someone else's hard work. That it was made FOR YOU.

And if it isn't, it's just wrong. It's playing with someone else's toys and skill and craft and using them to benefit yourself. It's forcing them and their work to be associated

with you and yours, even though they never agreed to that.

And if you're making money off of it....off of someone else's work without permission....ooof I don't actually have the words for how slimy that makes me feel just thinking about it.