This is the way to get work: be bright and be smart and be reliable and be nice and be competent.
(remember this?
That’s her.)
If I remember correctly, Kelly Sue turned up at a signing in about 1996 and asked if I needed an assistant, and gave me her email address. I didn’t, I already had one, but she’d seemed really nice and smart, and I wrote back to her telling her I didn’t need an assistant and wishing her well. And we stayed in touch. She wrote interesting emails, of the kind that you reply to, and sometimes she needed help or advice and I was always happy to give it. I think we got together once, socially, in late ‘98, and I was always sorry that it was just that once.
If I did any good to her career, other than being encouraging over the years, and being really thrilled whenever anything she did was successful (including getting married and having kids while writing good comics), I don’t know what it was. I liked being her cheerleader and I’ve enjoyed being her friend. For as long as I’ve been watching, she did it all herself.
There are married couples in comics, often brought together by a mutual interest in comics in the first place.
And there is a crippling sort of social sexism that sees women as peculiar appendages of their men.
It’s sad to see Kelly Sue having to defend herself. It’s reassuring to see her do it so well.
And I’m reblogging for all the people, especially the male people, who never gave any of this stuff a moment’s thought, so that next time something like this creeps across their radar they’re a little bit wiser, a little bit more prepared.
What you did:
Mostly, you encouraged me to keep writing, which, at the time, was—and still is—huge.
Then, though, more specifically, you allowed me to make two phone calls on your behalf when you were researching American Gods. Not a big deal; meant more to me than it actually saved you time, I’m sure. You also let me read the book in draft. For making those calls and reading that draft, you listed my name in the acknowledgements of the book.
I then told everyone I’d ever met that my name was in American Gods.
A bit later, Tokyopop was looking for someone to do the English adaptation of a series called DEMON DIARY. They wanted a PRINCESS MONONOKE feel. Jamie S. Rich recalled that I had ‘worked with Neil Gaiman’ — a wild exaggeration I did nothing to correct — and got me a try out. I adapted 10 pages as a test, got the gig and then… well, work begets work. 7 years later I had 10k + pages of adaptation under my belt — because I did good work, not because you let me make those two phone calls. But the fact that you let me make those two phone calls certainly helped.
(So did the fact that Jamie’s memory was filtered through a game of telephone and my ethics are apparently shifty.)
But there you go.
That’s What You Did.
Reblogged for Historical Accuracy, and for the curious, and because as I read it I found myself thinking about that line in my Make Good Art speech, when I said,
“You get work however you get work, but keep people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.”
I read this and thought, You get work however you get work. I love how Kelly Sue got work. I’m glad I was part of it. And if it hadn’t been like that, it would have been another way. Water finds its way downhill…
But she kept getting work because she did the work, and did it well. A ferocious work-ethic combined with niceness.
(Also note, she was helpful. I don’t just hand out thank you’s in the back of books indiscriminately, you know. You actually have to have helped.)
(via kellysue)