Tag: Eisner Awards

Bigfoot and Nessie is an Eisner WINNER!!!

If I couldn’t believe we were nominated for this, I REALLY couldn’t believe it when we won! I was excited just to get to go to the ceremony and sit at a VIP table. The awards ceremony took place at Comic Con in San Diego and there were, like, actual celebrities there presenting the awards! It was the coolest thing I’ve ever gotten to be a part of, even before we won. Even the meatloaf was good (it tasted like spaghetti!), and if you’ve read Renegade X, you can guess how I feel about meatloaf. :P

I was so prepared to not win that I took a sneaky picture of Mariko Tamaki’s trophy, since she was the first to win at our table, and I thought I might not get any closer to one than that. Except I also thought that the woman on my right (Erica Henderson) had real winner vibes and would probably get a trophy I could take an even closer picture of, lol. But our category came up fairly early on and we were actually the second win at our table. (By the end of the night, everyone at our table had won! We were grouped by publisher, so theoretically that was just a coincidence and it wasn’t purposely a winners’ table.)

Anyway, when they called out the winner and it was our book, I GASPED SO HARD and did a double take out of my seat. We got to go up on stage, where Gigi Edgley (Chiana from Farscape!) handed me my trophy.

The other presenter, Ming Chen, gave Laura her trophy. People keep asking me if we both got one or if we have to share, and if you were wondering that, too, let me ease your mind by saying everybody who won got their own trophy! Also, the trophies are very solid and heavy, like something that would turn out to be the murder weapon in a TV show. The globes actually spin, too, and the plaque has the name of our book and the category we won (Best Publication for Early Readers).

When I got to the microphone, I said what Pam says on The Office when she wins her Dundie, which is, “I feel God in this Chili’s tonight.” XD We didn’t have anything prepared, so I said a few funny things and then thanked Laura, plus our editor, Rachel Sonis, and our designer, Jay Emmanuel. I’m glad I didn’t have anything written ahead of time, because I feel like I do better improvising these things (otherwise known as winging it), and if I had sat down to write something, there are so many stories I could have told or things I would have wanted to express that I wouldn’t have even known where to start and would have stressed myself out. But ultimately, I think what I said in this post about getting nominated pretty much sums it up.

I don’t think anybody’s posted my part of it, but you can watch Laura’s speech:

I swear neither of us is that orange in real life.

 

Bigfoot and Nessie is an Eisner Nominee!!!

LOOK AT THAT BACKGROUND. I’ve never been nominated for anything in my life, and now my name is on a website with a classy light that follows you around as you scroll.

I found out about this last week and it still feels unreal! When I first got into publishing, I thought my books would stand out and get noticed. (LOL.) I thought all I had to do was get published and people would realize how much they loved my stories and characters and that of course there should be more of them. If you’re a fan, you might be thinking, “But that happened, right? Because I DO want more of your stories!” Well… yes and no. Readers have enjoyed my stories and connected with my characters (and OMG, thank you to everyone who has!), but the industry is tough. (Which industry? Doesn’t matter – they’re all tough.) And it still pains me to admit that I have not had the success I thought I would and, and – and this part is especially painful – might never have. Ugh. OUCH. It buuuuurns.

Ahem. Anyway. After fifteen spotty years of publishing, I thought my fate was decided long ago and that things like this were forever out of reach. Bigfoot and Nessie: The Art of Getting Noticed is about finding the courage to be creative in the face of the fear that you might fail. That no matter what you do, you might never get noticed. Or if you do, maybe outside validation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. These are the things I struggle with! I have felt like a failure, and I have felt frozen with fear that no matter what words I put down on the page, they’re going to be the wrong ones. Because if they weren’t the wrong ones… wouldn’t things be going better by now? Wouldn’t I have had the success I always thought I’d have?

Neither of those things are true, of course – it’s just my brain’s way of trying to make sense of something I don’t actually have control over. All I can really do is keep making things that bring me joy and hope they resonate with others. As a reader, I always feel like the author can feel my love for a book somehow, even if I never say anything, but as a writer, I feel like I’m putting things out into a void. Like messages in bottles sent off into the sea. Did anyone find them? Did they get where they needed to go? Did the right message get to the right person? Should I keep putting MORE messages in bottles, just to be sure?!

And all of that is a long-winded way to say that the creative life is tough and there are so many ways it can tear you down and make you feel not good enough. But sometimes it does the opposite and hands you something cool. Sometimes the bottles come back with new messages that prove you weren’t sending them off into a void after all.

This book was a collaboration between me, Laura Knetzger, Rachel Sonis, and Jay Emmanuel, and the rest of the team at Penguin Workshop. Having collaborators means not only having people to share the creative process with, but also having people to be excited with when something like this happens! I’m honored to have worked with this group and so proud of the book we made!