You're welcome. Do you write as in additional money or is it what you do to live, main occupation? What was easier/ fun - to create the vid, write song or create the story about that Canadian girl? & why Lifesicle is said ['lifsikel]?
I write for personal enjoyment mainly. Self-publishing is expensive so I pay for the cost of a limited run of books just so that I can say I did it. Mostly family and friends buy a few and then I give the rest away as gifts
There is no way I will recover the cost of the printing but that's okay.
I do a different kind of writing for a living (job title: Instructional Designer which is a fancy name for someone who writes e-learning courses).
As far as the Lifesicle project, all parts of it were equally fun! When I get an idea for a story it usually wakes me up in the night and I have to write the whole thing at once or I'll lose it. Then I spend lots of time editing it which is somewhat less fun, but necessary. The art in the book was a lot of fun this time. I'm more of a cartoonist/comic book style artist but I wanted to try abstract art, so that was a neat experience. I made the art style a part of the story.
The book was always the main project, and the song/video were something that came after. I came up with the idea of creating the video as a way to promote it (it was supposed to go viral! It didn't, LOL). So obviously I needed a song, and rather than buying stock music or something, I decided to do it myself. The song took about a month to do. I was waiting for the book to come back from the printer and needed to keep busy with something anyway. I really had a blast with it! As I said, I'm not really a musician but it was kind of proving to myself that I could do it, even if it was just a trifle of a thing.
The video was of course putting the song to a stop-motion animation, and I used very basic tools for that (I'm sure it shows). But I used the tools I had at my disposal. Which was kind of in the spirit of the story, DIY, self-publishing, all of that.
As far as the story being about a Canadian girl, well... they say write what you know. I based the 2 girl characters on my 7 year-old-niece and her cousin who are the same age and live down the street from each other.
It's pronouced Life-sickle, like Popsicle. I wanted to give it a fun, kind of abstract title to go with the art and story. And it sort of alludes to Life Cycle, which is also an element of the story.
By the way, thank you for these questions and taking an interest. It's fun to talk about