Help! I'm a prisoner in a T-shirt shop!

Okay, for the record, I did not set out to be a T-shirt salesman. Saleswoman. Whatever. I didn’t start writing stories just so I could sell T-shirts. But since I’ve had people ask me for months now when I’m going to start selling this or that T-shirt I made for myself on Cafepress, I have opened a T-shirt shop just so I can write instead of selling T-shirts. And that makes sense to me.

So here are the three shirts I’m selling so far, in their many variations, and where they came from.

1. The “Remember Who You Are” Shirt: I designed this one for Comic-Con this last summer, and I and my companion walked comfortably around the con in the ladies’ version. After I posted the art on Facebook (a version of it is the MASKS profile image, as you might have noticed), two or three people either posted on the page or contacted me privately, asking where they might buy such a thing. It had never occurred to me that other people would want to turn themselves into walking billboards for my book, but my mother always taught me that if people want to buy something and you’re willing to sell it, you don’t actually have a problem. So here are those shirts, in three variations: unisex (or men’s, if that helps, though I wear this cut a lot too), women’s, and women’s plus size. I apologize for the plus-size version being more expensive; Cafepress charges me more for those shirts, and it didn’t seem fair to charge more for the cheaper shirts just to compensate.

2. The (NINJA) Shirt: I actually have a hand-painted version if this that I made last year as part of a Halloween costume. I blogged about wearing it to the emergency room. Well, my brother saw me painting the original shirt and demanded one for himself, and he started wearing it to his dojo all the time, and now everybody in the dojo wants to buy one. Since Rae also wears such a shirt in one of the chapters—written in on a whim at two in the morning—it made sense to sell the shirt here. You may buy the (NINJA) shirt in any color Cafepress sells; my original is black. This shirt, too, is available in unisex, women’s, and women’s plus sizes.

3. The Sometime Superhero Jersey: I admit, I made this one just to see whether I could. Nicole’s haunting illustration for the first chapter of Masks has stuck with me as a good representation of the promise of the story, and it also features Rae in her Peregrine costume (unlike, oh, the first half of the book!). I wanted to experiment with putting Nicole’s moody ink-wash art on a shirt, and a black-and-white baseball jersey seemed like a better fit than a plain white or black shirt. Plus I wanted to design something with three-quarter sleeves, because that’s my favorite sleeve length. So here it is. Be warned—because it’s a unisex shirt, the sizes run a bit big, so if you’re debating between two sizes, ladies, get the smaller one.

So there you have it. Ordering through Pocket Coyote will take you directly to the Cafepress page. And I know the shipping seems absurd--but WordPress had no good way for me to note that if you're already buying a shirt from Cafepress, all other shirts ship for just $0.50 each. I’ll probably add more T-shirts as I get the ideas, or the art, for them … a friend is designing a Soleil shirt, and as soon as Nicole coughs up the art I want to make a “Team Trevor” shirt entirely for my own amusement. But in the meantime, whatever shall I do with myself?

Oh, right. I could write some more …