A Little Place to Escape: What 12 Angels Publishing Is Really About
Last week, I shared a little more about the person behind 12 Angels Publishing. This week, I thought I’d share a little more about the why behind it. When I first started 12 Angels Publishing, I thought mostly about books. Stories. Characters. Strange worlds and magical places that existed somewhere between my imagination and the page.
But somewhere along the way, 12 Angels grew.
There are books, of course. But there are also coloring pages, notebooks, journals, printables, and other little creative projects that don’t always fit neatly into one category.
For a while, I wondered if that meant I was doing too many different things.
Then I realized they really aren’t that different at all.
Sometimes We Just Need Somewhere Else to Go
Life gets busy. There are jobs and families and appointments and laundry and grocery lists and a hundred little things demanding our attention.
And sometimes we need a break from all of it. Not necessarily a vacation. Sometimes we just need twenty minutes.
A book can give us that. We can step into another world, meet people who don’t exist anywhere except between the pages, and worry about their problems instead of ours for a little while.
A coloring page can do something similar. There isn’t a plot or a character telling us where to go. There’s just a picture waiting for color and the simple decision of what pencil or marker to pick next.
A notebook can become a place for ideas, lists, dreams, doodles, prayers, stories—or whatever else happens to be bouncing around inside our heads.
And sometimes a beautiful little piece of art exists for no other reason than because looking at it makes us happy.
I love that there’s value in all of those things.
A Publishing House With Many Rooms
Lately, I’ve started thinking about 12 Angels Publishing as an actual house. Not a big corporate building, but a home.
And inside that home are lots of different rooms.
There’s a room filled with books and stories, with doors leading into fantasy worlds and places that exist only in our imaginations.
There’s another room with a big table covered in coloring pages, pencils and markers. That’s the room where you don’t have to think very hard. You can sit down, choose a color and simply create.
Maybe there’s a quieter room filled with notebooks and journals. A place to write something down, work through an idea, make plans, say a prayer, or dream about something that hasn’t happened yet.
And there are little rooms I’m still discovering.
That’s one of the things I love most about building 12 Angels. I don’t have to know how many rooms the house will eventually have. I just know what I want it to feel like when you walk through the door.
Warm.
Welcoming.
A little magical.
And somewhere you can stay for a while.
You Don’t Have to Visit Every Room. I think this matters, too. Not everything I create will be for everyone.
Someone who loves fantasy novels might never pick up a coloring page.
Someone looking for a peaceful evening of coloring might have absolutely no interest in reading one of my stories.
Someone else might simply want a notebook that makes them smile when they pull it out of their bag.
That’s okay.
You don’t have to visit every room in a house to feel welcome there. Find the room that feels like yours. And if someday you decide to wander down the hall and peek through another door, it’ll be there waiting for you.
The Worlds We Escape Into
That’s what we’re going to talk about here during August.
The imaginary places we love.
The little details that make fictional worlds feel real.
Why certain places stay with us long after we’ve closed the book.
And I’ll take you behind the scenes of some of the worlds I’ve created, too. Because I’ve always believed there should be a little wonder hiding somewhere in ordinary life. Sometimes we just have to give ourselves permission to go looking for it.
And if something created by 12 Angels Publishing gives you a quiet twenty minutes, sparks an idea, makes you smile, or lets you disappear somewhere else for a while…
Then you’ve found one of our rooms.
Come in. Stay awhile.
You can find the different doors into 12 Angels Publishing — books, stories, coloring pages, creative projects and more—at iggylife.com.
