Are You an Elephant or an Ocean Sunfish?

(this text was quickly translated by chatgpt and even more quickly edited by me, thank you for understanding! Written totally by me)

(The first day at the summer house, so naturally Monday’s longread is running late. But we did make it to the sea.)

There are two kinds of illustrators. And, obviously, not just illustrators, but probably anyone who works on their own projects.

You can spend years lovingly polishing one single project. Or you can keep throwing together a million tiny ones—some out of love, some out of excitement, and some simply because they appeared out of nowhere and now what are you supposed to do? You just have to draw them, write them, play them, whatever they happen to be, before they’ll finally leave you alone.

An elephant gives birth to one calf every few years and then fusses over it endlessly. She keeps crocodiles away, makes sure there’s always food and water nearby, watches over its physical, emotional, and social development.

An ocean sunfish has only one concern: get those millions of eggs out before they burst her, then drift lazily near the surface, basking in the sun until—because it won’t be long now—it’s time to release the next few million.

Well, kids, that’s how it is among bees, too (TR: Awww, in Russian it’s a slightly indecent joke, so sad the joke is missing in English)

And illustrators.

Can you guess which one I am?

Sometimes I’m a little jealous of people who can spend years moving the same project forward without getting bored. I watch them on Facebook and in real life with genuine admiration. Searching for the one perfectly authentic fabric to upholster the sofa in the room where the characters will eventually meet. Or—and this impresses me even more—looking at a scene after a hundred hours of work and calmly saying, “Nope. This isn’t working. We’ll redraw it. Rewrite it. Reshoot it. This time with different lighting.” Then waving goodbye to those hundred hours without a second thought.

The moment I’ve finished the first version—and almost certainly the only version—of something, I immediately get this unbearable itch to show it, tell people about it, publish it.

Every single time I press Publish, I know perfectly well it’s still half-baked. Give me another five minutes—or a couple of days—and I’ll probably think of something much better. Or I’ll realize I picked the worst possible moment and nobody will even see my brilliant idea.

And yet I publish it anyway.

Well… technically I could wait, it’s just incredibly hard, because tomorrow there will be new ideas, and this one will already seem silly. I’ll think, “What was I even trying to do here?” Then I’ll never show it to anyone, and it’ll disappear forever.

And somehow I feel sorry for it. Silly and awkward as it is. It must have appeared for a reason. The least I can do is give it one chance to fly or swim.

Which of these approaches works better, in the short run or the long run, I honestly have no idea. I suspect it depends not only on effort and love, but also on the quality of the ideas themselves, on a lucky—or unlucky—sequence of events, and on all those proverbial butterflies flapping their wings somewhere.

My very first early-reader series, “чей бок?”, came into the world exactly the same way as most of my other projects.

I wrote the whole thing in about half an hour while standing in the kitchen, cooking dinner, entertaining two small children, and apparently cooking the story in my head at the same time.

The next day my husband took the kids out for two or three hours, I drew the entire first Kindle version, uploaded it to Amazon the following day, and immediately ran off to tell absolutely everyone about it.

When I realized people actually liked those little books, I contacted a publisher.

Now that series—and the ones that followed—has been in print for ten years to everyone’s surprise, mine most of all.

Of course, countless little egg-projects have hatched only to vanish again, dissolving into the vast ocean of ideas before they ever had a chance to grow. And countless more never even hatched. They stayed exactly what they had always been: ideas.

On the other hand, I know some absolutely wonderful, wildly successful projects whose authors spend years just thinking through the first draft. Then years making it. Remaking it. Remaking the remake. Eventually those beautiful books win awards, earn recognition, and every time I see them I think, Now that’s the professional way to do it. That’s what I should be aiming for.

I’ve tried.

I simply can’t become a hedgehog. (Awww, also joke in Russian!)

And I suspect they sometimes try to launch fast, launch often, too.

But how can you release this funny little crooked creature into the world when you can already see it won’t swim very far?

So we keep looking at each other from opposite shores without learning much from one another.

And maybe that’s perfectly fine — an ecosystem needs elephants and it needs ocean sunfish, too. There’s room for all of us.