Writers of the Future: 29

by L. Ron Hubbard

  Yet none of this was what made Vivian fall in love with the Shaker.

  What made her fall in love was that He never raised His voice to her. He never threatened her. He smiled, and He gave her everything He could. He touched her softly, as if He were afraid she might break. He watched her eyes, always looking for the limit, where He would stop. He learned what she was like, inside and out, what she loved and what she feared, and He never used that knowledge to hurt her.

  She had been in Arlington almost a year, when one night she pressed her lips to His forehead, and murmured—“I love you.”

  His eyes sparkled like stars.

  Her daughter was born in June, healthy and strong with her mother’s dark hair and the Shaker’s blue eyes. She had breath, but no heartbeat, and her skin was cool to the touch. Vivian named her Erica, and wherever Vivian went she carried her daughter. The Whispers doted over Erica, and the Shaker’s eyes shone with something like pride and love whenever He looked at her.

  She grew rapidly, perhaps a little faster than a child should. Vivian never asked for a second child; she was devoted to Erica with her heart and soul. Her daughter had the promise of becoming a beautiful young woman.

  The Shaker began to ask for Vivian’s presence more frequently. Often she spent entire nights on Bone Rattler Street.

  He still begged her to say she loved Him again and again.

  Vivian didn’t know what was going on, why He was so insistent, but she indulged Him as best she could between raising her daughter and making her deliveries. He had become…demanding.

  He made love to her more fiercely, and yet also more carefully. He kissed her as if it might be His last chance. Vivian didn’t understand, but a slow dread began to form in the back of her mind.

  Was this the last burst before He grew weary of her, before He dismissed her? Or did He know something she didn’t?

  She wouldn’t find out until Erica was eight.

  Twelve years Vivian had lived as the Ghost Wife of Arlington. Twelve long, demanding, painful and beautiful years—a blink of an eye to the Shaker.

  The Shaker had not changed His form much since Erica’s birth—minor adjustments, creating an illusion of age as Vivian passed birthday after birthday. He was tender and yet unyielding, everything He had ever been.

  Vivian loved Him, and nursed the acceptance that one day He would turn away from her. He may have resembled a mortal man, but He was something more, something untamed and unreachable, an ocean of secrets she could never hope to fathom. All she had was His touch, her daughter, and her scars.

  But after Erica’s eighth birthday, Vivian felt the first signs.

  It started as a pain. It only came every so often, but gradually it grew in frequency and importance. She sought out doctors, and they did their best to treat her, but there was nothing they could do. The Sickness was inside her, growing and spreading.

  The Sickness was new in those days, and it baffled doctors and Immortals alike. Though it did not touch the Immortals themselves, it claimed many of their servants. It was quiet, and lethal in its patience, preying upon mortals with the advantage of time.

  The one person Vivian dared hope could help her was the Shaker. “Isn’t there anything you can do?” she asked, “Just so I can see my daughter grow up.”

  She had never seen a more grief-stricken look on the Shaker’s face as He shook His head. “Some things,” He whispered, “are out of my hands.”

  Vivian stared at Him. So. This was it.

  She did her best not to hint at it to her daughter, teaching Erica her work, and everything she thought her daughter would need to know. She didn’t know how much time she had, only that the pain in her was growing beyond her control. It ate at her day and night, consuming her from the inside out.

  The Shaker looked at her with grief. He did His best to ease her suffering, but she knew there would come a time when the one thing He could do for her would be to take the breath from her lungs. On the nights she came to Bone Rattler Street, He held her and tried to ease her pain until she slept.

  She carried on, and the Shaker watched her die, as He had watched a hundred other Ghost Wives die, with as much pain.

  He had never liked being helpless.

  Erica knew soon enough. Vivian managed to hold out until she was ten, but by then she could barely walk. She used a cane, and the people of Arlington watched and waited, wondering when the Shaker would end this.

  Erica was the one who begged Him to do it.

  The girl had grown up walking side by side with Death. She had no fear of what she asked; she had the knowledge her father would never die, and her mother was in so much pain.

  It was a summer’s night when He did. He made the night warm, and left Bone Rattler Street for the first time in over a century. The streets emptied before Him as He walked toward Vivian’s home, His black coat making Him a shadow. The Whispers followed, making His path darker.

  Vivian lay in bed, asleep. She was skeletal, and her lovely hair lay lank and colorless against the pillow. Her dark eyes had sunk into her skull. Her hands lay like limp spiders on the bed.

  The Shaker gazed at her, His face a mask. He saw in Vivian everyone He had watched fade away and die. A wiser creature would have stopped growing attached, would have kept His distance…perhaps even grown cruel. But the Shaker was not a wiser creature—He was, He supposed, a hopeless fool.

  He bent, kissing Vivian’s forehead. Then He laid His hand over her heart, and coaxed out a light. It was a small light, pulsing softly with warmth. The Whispers, huddled in the corners of Vivian’s room, fell silent as He pulled that light to His own breast, cradling it like a fragile child.

  Vivian ceased to breathe, and what little color had been left in her face drained away. The Shaker gazed a moment at her body, and turned away, the light cupped in His palm. Erica, in her little white nightgown, followed her Immortal father in silence among the Whispers, who muttered about her.

  They made a solemn procession through the summer night. At the head, the tall figure of the Shaker, with a little light cupped in His hands. Behind Him, a cloud of Whispers, and at the back, a young girl in a white nightgown. A few brave souls in Arlington watched it, and they heard a voice like Vivian’s weaving through the night air.

  It was a familiar song, of death coming to claim the soul, but carried a fresh chill with Vivian’s voice. The people of Arlington fastened their windows against it, and shivered in the new cold of the night.

  The next morning, Bone Rattler Street was silent. The Shaker stayed in His house, unseen. The Whispers kept to the shadows and made not a sound. The ghosts did not move from their hiding places.

  The sun did not pierce the gloom.

  In a small black dress, Erica made her way back to her mother’s house.

  There would be no more Ghost Wife for quite some time.

  For now, there would be only the Shade, the Devil’s Daughter of Arlington. The girl with breath, but no heartbeat—the girl whose skin was never warm, the girl with hair as dark as her mother’s and eyes as pale as her father’s. She moved in silence, like a shadow, the Whispers ever at her heels.

  She carried on her arm a red umbrella.

  Journey for a New Artist

  BY LARRY ELMORE

  Leonard Elmore has been creating fantasy and science fiction art for over 40 years. After receiving a BFA degree from Western Kentucky, he married Betty Clemons and was drafted into the Army almost at the same time. In the 1970s he began freelancing and was published in a few magazines, including Heavy Metal and National Lampoon. In 1987 he was contacted by TSR Inc., the company t
hat produced the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, and he worked there from 1981 to 1987. While at TSR, he helped set the standards for gaming art in the role-playing genre. Besides creating covers for Dungeons & Dragons, AD&D, Star Frontiers and other gaming books, he may be best known for his work with the world of Dragonlance. Since 1987 he has worked as a freelance illustrator, creating covers for comics, computer games, magazines, fantasy and science fiction books and projects too numerous to list.

  For the last five years he has been creating paintings for collectors and fans around the world. Larry has now opened his original commission section on his website, where he creates a complete concept drawing that lets collectors and fans choose concept drawings that they would like to purchase as finished paintings. These new paintings are, technique-wise, the best paintings he has ever created.

  Journey for a New Artist

  Working toward becoming a professional illustrator is like taking a journey without a map. There is no GPS to plot your course. It may be a long, rocky, difficult journey, or you may have an easier path to follow, because it is your personal journey.

  For many occupations there is a set course to follow: go to college, get a degree, make good grades, then apply to companies for jobs in your appropriate field. But lately, it seems that this old tried-and-true approach is becoming even more difficult. There has never been a set path for creative people such as artists, musicians, writers, actors and all occupations that would be included in the Arts.

  I can only talk about my personal journey that has led me to this point in my life /career. I always refer to my career and my life as one and the same. My life is my art; there is no separating the two. I have spoken to many groups of people during my career on this topic and I will go over a few points that I feel are important, which may help a young artist /illustrator on his journey.

  Try to educate yourself in your field. Go to college or a good art school, if you can afford it. Usually this opportunity comes when you are young, and because of your youth, you can more easily absorb the basics in your field and get a good foundation of art in general. Going to school at this time of your life does one more thing besides giving the obvious education: it buys more time for your “eye” to mature. You will learn to see your art more objectively and become a much more efficient self-critic. This helps you grow.

  Drawing is the foundation. Good drawing skills are a must. For example, if you start a painting and your drawing is weak, your painting will be weak. It is much more difficult and time-consuming to redraw or correct a drawing with paint. I cannot emphasize it enough: never stop drawing.

  Learn perspective. If your work is representational or realistic, then you must understand perspective. You can exaggerate perspective for certain effects, but the foundation of your exaggerated perspective must be correct. Everything you draw, every object is in perspective. Don’t guess at perspective, learn it.

  Learn to see. This applies to objects, shapes and colors.

  I had a lot of problems when I went from drawing an object to painting an object. I made the same mistakes that a lot of young artists make: I tried to color a drawing. My thought process was almost the same as coloring a line drawing in a coloring book. I was thinking symbolically. Since then, I have taken classes in color theory and learned by reading and observing other artists’ work, but what I have found that has taught me the most is learning to see.

  When I look at a real landscape, I try to see the real colors and values in nature, not the symbolic colors that are taught to us from the first grade up. I try to mix and match the colors and values in my mind when I am looking at that real landscape. Which different paints would I mix for those distant pine trees? A touch of green, raw umber, ochre, white, blue, purple? There lies the challenge, and it is so much fun.

  Painting from life, out in the field or in an enclosed environment, is a wonderful way to learn to see, and learn to see real colors and values. We have been trained during most of our young lives to think of shapes and colors symbolically. A good example is, “the sky is blue, the clouds are white, the grass is green, and then just add black to make the shadows.” That is so wrong. Watch a child draw a chair; it is usually in the shape of an “h,” a tree is two parallel lines with fluffy cotton-candy leaves around the top, and a shoe is always drawn in profile. Believe me, these symbols carry right into your adult lives.

  So, learn to see. You will soon learn that what at first looks like totally random patterns and shapes in trees, water, rocks, clouds and folds of clothing are actually repetitious patterns with slight variations. They are rhythms, consisting of musical notes slightly rearranged to play different melodies, all within the same song. Nature works that way.

  I used to think of all my tubes of paints by color names, like a box of perhaps thirty-two crayons. Later I started thinking of my tubes of paint as musical tones that help compose an overall melody, and now I think of them as tastes or flavors and I am cooking up some meal that will taste good to me. Different colors, hues and values have different flavors. So now I cook without using a recipe. As my mother and grandmother would say, I’m “cooking from scratch.” This helps keep me from thinking of colors with names, all placed neatly in the box of crayons. Real life doesn’t work that way, you can’t find a box that all the colors could fit into, and, on top of that, we don’t even have names for all the colors that are possible!

  Everything that I have said so far is to help you become a better artist, so you can compete with everyone out there, and today the world is much smaller. Now you are competing with artists around the world. You have to be good. I am not saying you must paint or draw exactly like some other professional artist, and you shouldn’t; besides, it is basically impossible to beat another man at his own game. As humans, we are all unique; we all have different fingerprints, and your creative fingerprint is inside you.

  Learn, study, do your best and you will see your creative fingerprint emerge. You may be influenced by many artists, but let all those influences flow through you, filter through you, and then let your art be you. You are the magic ingredient, your style.

  When I teach art classes, I have had students tell me that I am giving away all my secrets. But I have no secrets to give; there is no magic formula. The lessons I try to teach my students are things that they should learn, they should know, the basic knowledge to help them become an artist /illustrator. The secret ingredient is you. It is how you take all your knowledge of art, how you process it and interpret it and then let it flow through you. Then, when you paint or draw, your fingerprint will be all over it.

  If you become a freelance illustrator, you must be self-confident. Believe in your art. A freelance artist lives on a bubble of self-confidence. Beneath that bubble may rest a dark pit of depression.

  I think most freelancers have been in that dark pit once or twice. Most creative people have been there. I think it is because we are putting a bit of ourselves out there in the world to be admired, ridiculed and sometimes walked on. You have to grow a thick skin. If not, you will bleed a lot. I always say, “Thank God that everyone has different tastes in all the arts; if not, then there would be only one artist, one musician, one writer, and the world would be a boring place.” So if your art is good, there will be people out there who will enjoy it.

  The problem is getting your work out where it can be seen. You have to be a businessman also. You must learn how to market yourself. Learn about self-printing, especially digital printing, because in most cases, you can print in smaller quantities, making it less expensive. Some examples could be sketchbooks, prints of your art, stickers, posters—whate
ver way you can think of to get your art out there so people can see it and possibly purchase it.

  Go to conventions; a convention is a great place for people to see your art and purchase your art. I know artists who have built a huge fan base strictly by showing and selling their art at conventions; eventually, major publishers saw their work and published the artists nationally for the first time. Also, at conventions you have the opportunity to meet art directors from many different companies. Try to target publishers/companies that publish products for which your art may be suitable.

  You must be visible, and now it is easier than ever for an artist to become more visible in the world. Use the Internet; build a website; use Facebook, Twitter, any and all of the social outlets on the Internet, even YouTube.

  Use any outlet that will keep your art and your name out there. Remember, the only person who truly cares about your success or failure as an artist/illustrator is you. The only person who will sacrifice, push, work, dig, stay up all night working hard long hours is you. That is a hard thing to truly understand sometimes, but the bottom line is that you are responsible for your career, because no one else really cares as much as you.

  Being an artist /illustrator will not be a life of smooth sailing on a calm sea; there will be rough waves, always. So you have to be strong.

  Think of the typical professional football player. The average player doesn’t make millions, like the superstars, but that average player works just as hard. They practice being strong and tough, because part of their job description is being knocked down over and over, just to win a single game, and this is how it works for their whole career. The average career is not that long.

  I feel that I am in a game, and that game is my life as an artist. It is full of hard knocks, but as long as I stand back up and keep playing, continue making a living from my art until I die, then I will win the whole damn game!