Sword Woman 2
- SWORD WOMAN 2 - A black Ink and black color pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size coquille board. It appears in the paperback book, "Sword Woman" by Robert E. Howard, published by Zebra Books in 1977.
When I showed my preliminary sketches to a young assistant editor at Zebra Books, he was shocked to see that my "sword woman" was wearing a wide-brimmed feathered hat, dressed in pantaloons and swinging an epee (a fencing sword). "No, No, No" he uttered, "We want her in a steel helmet, wearing armor, swinging a broad-sword, like Conan the Barbarian! This is Robert E. Howard here, not the fancy Three Musketeers"! I responded with, "But this is Howard's version of the Musketeers, all the characters in the story use fencing swords like the Musketeers, they wear clothes like Musketeers, and the story takes place during the era of the Musketeers". He ran out of the room and came back a few minutes later. "We don't care," he said, "we want all the characters looking like barbarians, we want the cover art and the interior illustrations to attract "Conan" readers". . . So that's what I did. And now, anyone who reads this book will think that I did not, since my drawings are all wrong in the details!
Publishers: Many of them do not have the competence to recognize an outstanding work of literature from a poor one. Years of "hoaxes" put upon them seems to prove it; major publishers have often received a manuscript that is a literary classic, under a different title and author name, and did not recognize it. Rejected it! Most publishers don't take chances with unknown writers, their financial advisors prefer that they publish books about any celebrity who is in the news, and any writer who has sold at least one profitable book (even though their latest work has no merit). It is rare however that they will publish a great work of literature by an unknown, until one of them, at minimum expense decides to take a chance. Lots of writers who wrote classics and multimillion dollar best seller books first suffered through the "reject" circuit before they became famous.
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