It is with no small amount of disappointment that I have to cancel my plans for the Halloween Tree project I’ve been working on. I was lucky enough, through the pieces I had already completed, to get in touch with Sam Weller, editor of Shadow Show, an anthology tribute to Ray Bradbury’s work and legacy, and also the personal biographer of Bradbury. Sam got me in touch with Don Congdon and Associates, managers of Bradbury’s literary estate, and I enquired about permission to continue and to ultimately publish my drawings under the Halloween Tree name.

Being that this project is largely fan art, part of me feels that it should be safe from liability – artists make fan art all the time. Hell, some even sell prints of their fan art, though usually in small quantities. The amount of time I knew I’d be putting into this project in order to ‘do it up right’, though, I knew I wasn’t going to be happy just showing it off and maybe selling the originals down the road. I immediately made plans to publish the pieces as a nice folio edition when they were completed, and I knew I’d need permission to do that.

Sadly, the word came back from Congdon yesterday that, with ongoing negotiations regarding a newly-illustrated edition of the book in the works, authorizing a second set of illustrations would dilute the market and cannibalize any potential sales of the new book. Neither the literary estate nor the publisher would be happy with that outcome, so they would not be granting me permission or selling me a license to publish my folio.

With the folio out of the equation, I don’t see the possibility of recouping my costs to produce the drawings at this point. Each one so far has taken roughly 20-30 hours. I’m sorry to say, but I just can’t afford to be spending several hours a day for several weeks on each piece. I did reach back out to express interest in talking again once the currently-in-negotiations license expires, but who knows when that will be.

I’m exploring several alternate options, including designing a set of generically-halloween-themed pieces, refocusing my energies on one of my own stories and working on that more, or finding a public-domain work and creating illustrations based on that.

There is still one piece in the Halloween Tree plan that I feel safe enough in completing. Titled ‘The House’, it’s a drawing of a large, run-down, spooky Gothic mansion. Nothing specific enough to tie it to the book, it could stand on its own as a decent illustration. I would even feel comfortable making prints available, maybe even in time for Halloween. So, I’ll be working on that in bits and pieces over the next few weeks, but I have a lot of other things going on leading up to Rose City Comic-con, so don’t expect a lot of updates.