How to Make a Love Potion

         This post is a case study of the strange and twisty ways of creativity and creation.  It begins back in the summer, when I was approached by Miguel O. Mitchell to collaborate on his own project of love: a book of poetry combining chemical elements and space aliens.  So there were actually seeds being planted before that, in May when Miguel saw my work at a virtual convention.  (You can see more about Miguel’s project in previous post Periodic Table of Aliens.)  I agreed to do illustrations for 14 of his poems, and one of those was about sodium.  Miguel’s poems were fun to illustrate because they gave only a few clues to indicate what the aliens might look like, which left things wide open for me to add my own ideas to the mix.  All Miguel gave me for sodium was that “in the slime of Oodleplops [it] is part of fake love potions.”  Out of those two lines I had a vivid image of a gelatinous, slimy creature tending the counter in some dark, old-time general store, shelves crammed with every sort of patent medicine.  I created the block print which I called “Love Potion.”

        Having completed the block, a whole different image popped into my head, placing my picture in a story that actually had nothing to do with Miguel’s poem.  Now I was thinking of some sort of Lovecraftian Old One living on Earth, rather than an alien somewhere on another world.  I am not a fan of horror, and was imagining how such an Old One might be quite fond of the patrons of his shop, and thus the whole story spooled itself out from the premise of a friendly, slimy, tentacled Old One selling all manner of magical wares… including love potions.

        I want to make two points about the process of writing that story.  First, it is very rare for inspiration to strike me so definitively and with such a fully-formed story.  I am not the sort to talk about stories “writing themselves,” or bolts of inspiration from the blue.  This story was very unusual for me in coming so easily.  But the second point is that it’s still not accurate to say it came out of nowhere.  Perhaps it came like a bolt of lightning, but it was lightning that struck and fused together all the grains of sand that were already lying around.  Or to return to the metaphor I used earlier, various seeds had been planted much earlier.  There was the seed that came from Miguel’s Oodleplop, of course.  There was my own love of the reconstructed 1900 Main Street and general store in the Cleveland Historical Society Museum, plus Woolworths, where it seemed like you could find anything from sneakers to lightbulbs to accounting books to parakeets, plus the beautiful old cash registers that a few shops still had when I was a child.  There were the seeds of my general attitudes toward monsters and love potions and the modern dating scene.  There were all the bits and pieces that are rattling around in my mind all the time, waiting for the seed of an idea to glom onto.  But certainly it felt like magic that a handful of those bits and pieces and seeds did glom together so satisfyingly.

        And it was another piece of magic, perhaps, that I submitted the story to the editors of Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, and they decided that it would be a fun piece to publish for Valentine’s Day.  In another funny little bit of serendipity, I did not offer them my original illustration, but when the editors went looking for an appropriate illustration, they came across mine, and asked to use it!  They also asked if I’d like to do a second illustration for the story, which I did.  So I think this process illustrates the strange and wonderful combination of preparation (gathering and cherishing all those seeds) and luck (meeting Miguel, and having an editor like my piece) that go into getting a story out into the world.

        Meanwhile, I am keeping the rejection pipeline flowing with nearly a dozen other short stories, so I hope to have news of other publications before too long.  But in the meantime, please go on over to Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, read my story, and support their work in bringing SFF stories to the world.

[Pictures: Love Potion, rubber block print by AEGN, 2021 (first published in Periodic Table of Alien Species (Elements 1-86) by Miguel O. Mitchell);

Ineffable Feathersquid, digital illustration by AEGN, 2022 (first Published in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, Feb. 2022).]