Authors
The people who wrote them
Authors published through Cantu Publishing.
- KL
Illustrator and coloring book author
Kelly Laurent
Writes under a pen name · Cantu Coloring Creations
An artist working in the hills above San Luis Obispo, drawing line work meant to be finished by somebody else.
Kelly Laurent draws for other people to color in. Her books are line work rather than finished pieces: fairies, florals, stained glass, patterns dense enough to disappear into for an afternoon. The point of the work is that it is not done until a reader picks up a pencil and finishes it.
She lives and works in the hills above San Luis Obispo, California, in a house with too many windows and a golden retriever who considers the studio his. Most days start with a walk somewhere with a view and end with ink on her hands. She is unhurried about it, and says the light out there does half the drawing for her.
She spent a long time being talked out of calling herself an artist, and is straightforwardly delighted to have stopped listening. Making books that other people sit down and finish is, as far as she is concerned, the whole dream.
Puzzle constructor
Sterling R. Key
Writes under a pen name
Builds puzzles at the far end of difficult, and would rather the puzzles did the talking.
Sterling R. Key makes puzzle books for people who have run out of hard ones. The series is called Impossible Difficulty and the title is not ironic: mazes, crosswords, word searches and sudoku built to the point where finishing one is an event rather than an afternoon.
Very little else about him is on the record, which appears to be the arrangement he prefers. No photograph, no interviews, no notes on method. What is known is that the grids are constructed rather than generated and thrown at a page, and that every one of them has exactly one way out.
He has been asked more than once to make an easier edition. He has so far declined.