Eleven months.

I am having a hard time believing that it's nearly a year since Becoming Marlo became an actual thing, taking up actual space in the physical world. 

I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I expected to feel... different. Welcome to "Amateur Hour", I'll be your host, Shelley Z, lol.

I suppose I didn't think that getting the word out would be so hard. I mean, the Internet, come on. Aren't things supposed to just go viral and stuff? Again, here I am, naive novice, comin' atcha. Or not really comin' atcha, actually, since I kind of gave up on that. Didn't I.

In truth, I'm not exactly sure what to say. Maybe it's not what I say, but just being "out there". Which is hard for me. It's hard not to feel invisible when the world is so big that my little voice barely registers on the Internet scream-meter. But contributing to my own invisibility by doing nothing certainly isn't helping.

So I'm back! We're back, Marlo and I. We're gonna give this another try. 

I was going through my piles of sketches, doodles, and assorted scribbles last night, and I found the Becoming Marlo character sketches I made, trying to get the characters out of my imagination and onto paper. I tend to find that stuff interesting, personally, when artists show their works in progress, the evolution of their thoughts, made manifest in the real world, and how they transformed those thoughts into the works of art that we know so well.

So here are a few of those character sketches, for Marlo and Starling, in which I was trying to figure out how best to style them.

I think it's kind of funny that Marlo went from being dandy-ish to more of a basic jeans and shirt guy, more like me. Starling had to match him, of course.

Going back to the early imaginings and scrawlings of the book has been good for me, I think. Expect more of this!