Okay, I hate to do this because I’m sure it will make me seem like an egotistical braggart, but I’m gonna do it anyhow.

Yesterday I wandered into a Barnes & Noble, over in the art technique section, and…they had It. Digital Fantasy Painting. By Burns. The book that I contributed to, and which I hadn’t yet seen.

With trembling spleen and most of my other minor organs aquiver, I took it down, flipped through it and…there they were. My two contributions, the dragon tutorial and the bit about Painter and “Atlantis Calling.”

This is the first time I’ve ever walked into a store and seen my work on a shelf. Okay, barring that time that I found the local used bookstore clearancing “Big Air Wakeboarding” which I’d done the skins for, but that hardly counts, since they couldn’t give the damn things away and my name was tucked somewhere near the bottom of the credits. And I suppose I’m in the credits for the Myth II Expansion, too, but they butchered my dialogue, and my name is like five pixels high and buried near the back of the manual, so I’m not counting it. (Although I’m still pissed. It was perfectly good dialogue! Why, oh why, did it get rewritten by someone who was trying to sound like a bad Beowulf-meets-Silmarillion clone? Nobody REALLY says “And it came to pass…” I hope he was a good producer, ‘cos that boy’s writing would make George Lucas go “Man, that sounds stilted.” Err. Where was I?)

Annnnyway, past listings in the credits aside, this was the first time something in my, hmm, idiom, actually appeared in a big chain store where presumably a number of people will buy it, and I felt all warm and fuzzy and light-headed, and wandered out of the store grinning like a shark on nitrous, and all was well with the cosmos.

Leave a Reply