Today we’d like to introduce you to Paulus Linnaeus.
Hi Paulus, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’ve been an artist all my life, on the inside, and it’s not a part of yourself that you can keep shut away forever. I had plenty of successful conventional careers – doctor, teacher, real estate, editor, writer, and so on – before I finally returned to what I always wanted to do: create graphic novels. So after many years, and traveling and working in many countries and places around the globe, I returned to this continent and used that real-world experience to build my stories.
Most people don’t realize that artistic creation, nowadays, is a lot more than just inspiration and perseverance. I mean, everyone acknowledges these things in the abstract, but unless they’ve accomplished it… Well, business discipline counts a lot more, especially with the internet, the global village, and the blazing-fast pace of commerce and publishing.
I started my own privately held publishing company for the express purpose of advancing my artwork (i.e., my Demonhuntress graphic novels) in a way that couldn’t be warped by the superficial demands of conventional marketing for visual narrative work of this kind. After turning down a few offers from more traditional publishers, I realized that I had the power in my business background to do it myself. Any benefits gained from the perceived “safety” of a contract leave an artist beholden to corporate bodies, some of which are actually okay and fair (they’re not all bad!) but whose immediate financial pressures tend very strongly to bend one’s original artistic vision into something less than pure, to cater to what feels the public might want.
As Cher once said in an interview many years ago, I’d be afraid to play it too safe; my biggest fear is looking back and wishing I’d taken that chance to do it my own way. Playing it safe leads to regrets, in my own words.
The Demonhuntress series of graphic novels now sells in English, French, and Italian, with sales all over the world, from Australia to France.
I’m glad I had faith in my determination. It was cultivated after trekking through the deserts on three continents and being a skydiver. After experiences like those, and many others, one never has self-doubts again that can’t be controlled. It gives you a terrific mental edge, and that’s what all entrepreneurs have.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
God, no! The worst thing was, generally, dealing with the naysayers, who come in two types. My close family and friends always meant well, but they always advocated playing safe (see my last point!). As for others, they were mostly just disinterested busybodies and know-it-alls; for me, it’s easy to dismiss these last ones in recent years, as I’ve learned that the approval of others almost always comes at a cost that just is not worth it. More prosaic challenges are the ones most people shrink in terror from, notwithstanding all the tough talk: financial commitment, leaving a safe job path… these are all things that separate the talkers from the doers and leave the overwhelming majority of people in the dreamers-with-regrets camp. I mean, honestly, everyone always at one time or another, boasts about how they know better or could do better, but when it comes to calling the raise, they mumble themselves away or turn completely urinary with fear.
The biggest struggle is psychological and overcoming the voices in your mind, often fed by others around you. Overcome that, and you win the world. You create your own world.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
As Robert Kiyosaki has famously said many times, once you achieve passive wealth, then time works for you instead of consuming you and preventing you from striving for what you really want to get to. Okay, I’ve paraphrased his words a bit, but that’s the core message that I took from reading his works since the late 90s, along with the idea that you always adapt and overcome. It reflects in my work as a pure artistic expression of what I want to convey in my stories: suspense and that slightly unsettling feeling that everyone experiences when they’re in that netherworld dream-like state between surreal dreams and nightmares and being fully awake. Even when we’re awake, we all still sometimes feel that underworld nagging at us – and the heroine in my graphic novels personifies this archetype.
Elsewhere, my artwork and stories are fully unadulterated works rendered by my human hand and mind. I don’t use any kind of digital enhancement or AI (artificial intelligence) in my artwork. While I admire some of the digital work done by artists (preferably without violating the intellectual property of other true human artists), the artistic process for me is entirely handmade. My artwork is a product of the human mind and heart, and it shows in the way my characters exist and interact and the world in which they live. One look at the examples on TheDemonhuntress.com website tells the reader that there is a distinct style at play. More meaningfully, it reminds them of their own discomfited existence when they take the time to read what the Demonhuntress struggles within her world. The moral ambiguity she has to overcome is drawn from real life.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
Well, I guess I touched on this before, but leaving a very successful career as a specialist doctor and a clinical professor, after spending so many years preparing for it no less, well… the idea of choosing to dump all that for an uncertain new beginning as an artist struck most people as being about as crazy as quitting the supreme court to become a bail bondsman. But I listened to the original voice inside me, the voice of the artist that started speaking to me when I was six years old and learned to shut out the other voices.
One of my former instructors was playing golf with me one day, many years ago, and we came to the precipice of a ravine with a dogleg hook around it. The conventional safe way would be to play two shots around the corner, but he saw me sizing up the riskier straight shot over the ravine and asked me slyly: So, Paulus, are you a risk taker?
Of course, I went for the long shot over the ravine and made the shot.
But the real lesson in risk is not just taking the path that scares most people away – after all, they look for consensus approval from the crowd, and almost nobody wants to take that risk, and yet they all want to be the first to succeed at a new thing! No, the real lesson is that you will frequently hit the wall and crash and have to listen to those naysayers saying, “I told you so!”… and then you get up and keep fighting.
That’s the real conquest of risk: jumping back in the saddle again after a crash and learning how to increase your luck so that eventually you get what you’re after. God knows I missed plenty of golden targets before I learned better ways – but I stuck with it, and learned from the wrecks, and prospered in the end. By the way, the real victory is not measured in dollars; it’s the victory itself.
Pricing:
- Most of my books retail for between about 10 and 30 bucks. What have you got to lose?
Contact Info:
- Website: www.TheDemonhuntress.com
- Instagram: @AlexistheDemonhuntress
