Inspiration can come from funny places

[aadler]

It’s 3½ years now since I reached the point where I had cover art for every one of my stories. By early 2020, I had experimented enough with basic graphic programs that I could begin doing my own artwork; before then, however, I got it by begging. At my request, I was provided story banners by gillo (1 fic), angelus2hot (1 fic), red_satin_doll (1 fic), comlodge (3 fics), and blondebitz (4 fics).

Starting in 2015, however, I began getting artwork from my daughter sroni.

With my previous contributors, I was satisfied with what they gave me, and wouldn’t have dared to request corrections or revisions. (The only exception — and as minor as I could make it — was when red_satin_doll graciously replaced a capital letter with lower-case one so that By Aadler became by Aadler on “All Ye Who Enter”.) The stuff from sroni, though … I was able to give her some idea regarding what I would like for a particular story, so that what she produced was sorta-semi of my own design even if I didn’t do the actual work, and then there would be various small adjustments till I was satisfied.

There was a lot of back-and-forth on the art for “… Than Meets the Eye”: different elements adjusted, shifted, and tweaked until the final result was what I was looking for. What I was looking for, however, I had known the basics of that from the beginning. That was just how it needed to BE.

It wasn’t until a number of years later that a random thought crossed my mind, and I realized that I might have got just a slight bit of inspiration from another source:

I’m not chagrined; I actually laugh about it, that something like that could sneak in on me when I was positive it was all my own idea.

You just never know.