Failure to Thrive, or, the Art of Late Blooming

confessions of a creative impostor, plus concept art from the future book

Back in April I planted sixteen rosebushes. I dug up a long strip of lawn, churned the dirt with new soil and compost, and stuck sixteen bare root roses into the ground. My plan is to grow the most heavenly of hedges—sixteen varieties abloom with names like “The Poet’s Wife” and “Eustacia Vye” and “Munstead Wood.”

I’m not an experienced rose gardener, which is why it might not be surprising to learn that only about half of the roses have put out new growth. The others just look like half-buried thorn canes—no sprouts, no growth, nothing. I don’t know if their sprouts are still coming or if I somehow managed to kill the hardiest of garden flowers.

one of the roses I didn’t kill

It was my mother’s birthday this week. She turned sixty years old, and we had planned a lovely day at a mountainside spa lounging around in terrycloth robes and sipping cucumber water in a hot tub surrounded by pine trees and snow-capped mountains, but the spring runoff and subsequent avalanches made it so the one and only road to the spa was closed.

No spa day. It broke our hearts just a little. My momma deserves all the cucumber water she could drink.

the beautiful spa we did not get to enjoy

Of course, my mother was born with a broken heart.

She didn’t grow well in those early months of her life, so the doctors diagnosed her with “failure to thrive.” Upon closer look, they found that her heart had not formed correctly. She had heart surgery as a one year old, the pieces of her heart stitched and sewn into the correct configuration over hours and hours on an operating table.

When the doctor finally came out, his surgical clothes were spattered with blood. He looked overcome, defeated. My grandparents feared the worst. What had happened to their broken-hearted baby?

”Oh, no!” said the doctor. “Everything was fine. It just took longer than I was expecting.”

I think of my own life—specifically my creative life—and “failure to thrive” feels like the most plausible description. Though now that I’m older and wiser (ha ha) I can see that it’s probably more a case of late blooming. Despite my age, I’m still in discovery mode—the work that takes place beneath the topsoil—a mangled, cobwebby spread of roots and blooming mycelia.

I came to comics as a writer. And like plenty of writers before me, I haven’t always had a healthy relationship with writing. I bullied myself into finishing a novel for an MFA when I was in my twenties, and then struggled uphill against my own self loathing for years after that.

For those formative years in my creative life, I was also a new parent and a recovering overachiever. Bullying myself was something I knew how to do well, amidst so many failures. I couldn’t keep house or keep track of the field trip forms, the least I could do was self-flagellate over my failures as a writer.

I wasn’t successful.

I also wasn’t happy, so I did a lot of work untangling the inner critic from the artistic critic. I stopped writing. It was painful to un-learn my self-loathing, and I found I needed some distance from my work in order to shift my toxic mindset. A lot of things shifted for me then—not only did I give up writing from a place of self-loathing, I also gave up eating from a place of self-loathing (no more diets), exercising from a place of self-loathing (no more running marathons) and believing things from a place of self-loathing (no more religion). I gave up brick after brick of my whole internal jenga tower, but still, it didn’t help.

After the self-loathing was gone, I experienced a different sort of failure to thrive. I wasn’t writing, wasn’t making anything. And I was losing my mind.

There’s a kind of gaping, bleeding pain that comes from watching your dreams die. I couldn’t keep it up, so I had to find some way to make things again. I knew, deep down, that the missing piece was art—comics and illustration, specifically. Though I’d had a webcomic for years, I’d given it up sometime in college for not being serious enough. I was a serious literary writer (lol).

But when I found myself halfway between my 30s and 40s, everything had suddenly become too serious. There was COVID and late stage capitalism, my friend dying of cancer, and a world afflicted with so many slow poisons.

So I saved up my paychecks from my 10-hours-a-week writing job and bought myself an iPad. I started drawing again—comics and portraits and children’s illustrations. It felt good to make something, especially something as unserious as comics.

It’s been three years and now, I’m feeling the itch to stretch myself again.

So, the book.

I wrote versions of this story for years. I wasn’t mature enough to see the shape of it, or understand what I wanted to say. Now I see where it’s going, but I’m struggling to bring it from my mind to the page. For the past several months I’ve been raging against my ineptitude as an artist—I’ve been beyond frustrated and feeling so. far. behind. everyone.

Late blooms. Failure to thrive.

It seems like I haven’t fully left that toxic mindset behind. But, unlike before, I keep sitting down every day, and I keep telling that voice to keep quiet.

What I’ve learned is, if you sit down every day, and tell that voice to keep quiet, you eventually make something good.

So I have a few bits of concept art to show you from the future book. I’m new to all of it, so it’s slow going but exciting.

First, I’ll share some character designs.

This book unfolds as a story told by a grandmother to her granddaughter—a bedtime fairy tale set in WWII Germany. It’s about family stories, family secrets, family trauma. Here’s the grandmother, based on my own German grandmother:

She’s so cute! My own grandma was so very tiny—you’d be surprised how hard it is to convey size in a character’s design. I’m sure she’ll look even bittier when she’s set in her own world, amongst the other characters.

And here is a younger, fictional version of me:

I needed this kid to be the right age, height, body type (I’m not as thin as my grandma was, so a little rounder) and still look like she could be related to the Grandma, both as her older and younger selves. It was harder than it looks!

In fact, initially, I drew myself like this:

I still love the character design, but she reads too old, and doesn’t quite look like the granddaughter of the other character. I also wanted the “me” protagonist to be similar in age to my grandma during the time when her story took place—14 years old. I think the first image is definitely closer to that age.

Then, of course, was the design for my grandma’s younger self. I wanted it to feel a bit more time-bound, and more dreamlike than the other characters—as though she was floating into the present from somewhere in the hazy, half-remembered past. That’s why she’s in a more sketchy, grayscale style:

Initially, my grandma’s childhood character looked much more cartoonish. I definitely fiddled with her design the most. I drew her in my usual style over and over again, but her cuteness felt like it undercut the seriousness of the story. I couldn’t imagine putting this sweet little thing

through all the trauma my grandma experienced during the war, so played with her eyes a bit, and the shading of her face, hopefully making her more mature, more serious, without aging her into adulthood.

It’s interesting to see how quickly the tone of the entire story shifts with such minor changes in the character design. I love both characters, but the one on the right is definitely a better fit.

A lot of the story also takes place in the forest outside my grandmother’s village, so I’m trying to create a setting that feels broody and atmospheric—haunted and enticing at the same time. I think I’m getting there, though I can tell I need to evolve the look even more. Here’s my favorite experimental forest piece from this week:

I especially love that floppy lil guy hanging from the branch. He needs holp! holp himmm!!!!

I’m learning so much in this process, improving my drawing skills a ton (ARMS ARE SO HARD) and learning how to play with color and light and what a character’s eyeballs should look like—it’s a lot, but I’m so glad that I have space to do this instead of, say, teaching English at a community college, or writing copy for a subscription-based vitamin supplement (which may yet still be around the corner for me, but I’m hoping to keep the groping hand of capitalism at bay for as long as possible). For now, I’m just showing up to the chair and hoping for something good to come from it.

Thanks for being here, my friends. I know it’s been slow going in my corner. That’s what’s needed for something new to unfold. Thank you for trusting me, and for being here.

I can’t wait to show you more.

Best,

🖤Becca Lee, Haunted Librarian🖤