Behind the ink
Aubin Elise
I wrote the first draft of my book in just a few months, back in 2019. I was fourteen. Since then, I spent countless hours rewriting and polishing it. A few months after turning seventeen, I published it. Since then, I’ve been quite busy with the sequel.
Sign up for the mailing list at the bottom of the page to stay up on news, pre-sales, and more.
Author Photoshoot for The Second Nature of Indigo
These are the pictures of little, sixteen-year-old Aubin months away from publishing The Second Nature of Indigo.
I had a clever idea for a book trailer (that is not at all a proper book trailer) and shot it with my Dad in the woods. Budget: 7$. That gorgeous cape is my mom’s from a long time ago. My grandmother found the black dress in storage. It was also my mom’s. The chair is from good ol’ IKEA. All I needed was a dual colored typewriter ribbon (there’s the 7$ setback).
All the rest we did with what we had, including royalty free music and free video editing software. We shot, unsurprisingly, on my Dad’s iPhone. You can find a fun BTS reel of us bringing the yellow chair down to the copse of trees on my insta and watch the whole book trailer on Vimeo.
Fun Fact: the typewriter is broken and cannot advance. All that clacking you see me doing? That wasn’t moving against the paper at all. So, I had to print it from the computer onto the onionskin paper and arrange my shots carefully so that no one would notice. Honestly, I am very proud of my first foray in writing/directing/editing/producing for the screen.
the book signing photos…
These pictures were taken by me on an iPhone. I was all alone and had recently gotten the first shipment of books (from Amazon at the time, now we print elsewhere) that were to be sent to those that preordered through the Kickstarter. I had such a fun time doing this photoshoot. The challenge of it excited me. I would set the camera up, record a video, check it, and then pick the best stills. If you want to see the video, I clipped them together in a reel on my Instagram. Actually, that reel is about 4 or 5 different angles in 10+ different individual clips. I suppose some part of me likes video editing.
So, here’s 17 year old Aubin, posing for her own pictures.
Fun fact: personalizing books makes me nervous (spelling reasons). I’m dyslexic and took solace in many edits and spell check to make sure what I wrote was correct. When you sign books, however, there’s no cheating. I hyped myself up for a few minutes and sat down to the small stack of letters I was going to send with each hardback order of Indigo copies. I picked up the pen, shaky, and thought, “It’s just ‘thank you’ I know how to spell thank you.” Then, I watched myself as if I were at my own shoulder write…
“Thany”
Yup. First try. I think I’ve gotten better by now…
and some lyra pics.
I understand that probably a lot of people wouldn’t learn an intense circus art just for book research. But I would.
I didn’t need to, though. I’d already been learning aerial silk for a year and a half when I started writing The Second Nature of Indigo. Now, lyra (pictures below) would come after my first draft of Indigo. However, I watched plenty of videos about it, preparing me for the day I inevitably started learning.
And so… I did. I bought the hoop you see below and started teaching myself. This was not as easy as I supposed it would be. (Heh. No kidding.) It was so demoralizing that I almost quit. I’d already been doing silks to 2+ years and I’d spent most of that time teaching myself. I should be better at this shouldn’t I? I’d built up the strength and flexibility I’d needed. But… lyra is, in my experience, just generally harder. Not to mention the balance point and style of movement are completely different. I got to a point where I had to decide if I was ready to be bad at something (and I mean really bad) again or… if I would give up.
Well… I made my choice.
This photoshoot is a bit more recent. I’m twenty years old in these photos and quite a bit of time had passed since I started doing hoop/lyra. I think it’s been… four years since I started.
I’ve never been to a class. I bought my equipment and experimented. Homeschool-style.
If you want to see videos of my doing lyra or silks, go to my Instagram and follow me there. I post about it fairly regularly. <3
What am I reading?
Welcome to Bookshop.org
These are the best of the best of what I’ve been reading recently. I highly recommended every book on here, and you can read my descriptions for all of them over on Bookhshop.org.
I’m so happy to be working with Bookshop.org because of their beneficial impact to artist and small business owners around the country. <3 Bookshop is a competitor to Amazon that supports local indie bookstores and authors. And, with the link below, me! Thanks for supporting indie. It’s a revolution.
