Working at night

(music playing) Stefan G. Bucher: To do the work that I do takes, for me, a lot of concentration, and that's really hard to do when there are other people even just awake, I think. The phone rings and emails comes in, and so during the week I just--I have to lock myself away and be sort of monastic about it, so that I can get the stuff done. Working at night just really suits that. Artists are supposed to have a haunt or something where you have--there's a particular bar or coffeehouse that you hang out with, and this is pretty much mine is it's my local supermarket at night, where the whole night crew knows me, and they pretty much look forward to me coming in because they know it's quitin' time when I show up. When my work shows up somewhere, I'll bring them some samples and in exchange, they let me slip in the door at 1:59 a.m. At one point, I came in and they started giving me hard time where they said, "It's 2 a.m. The Ralphs is now closed, except for Stefan." I mean that's VIP treatment of a very different sort of vampiric kind, and I'm okay with that. Where people give me a hard time is sort of like 'oh, the late hours, and why can't you just be like everybody else and work a normal day? It'll be so much easier' or 'wouldn't it be nice?' Then people try to make that distinction of like 'yeah, but that's your work, but what about your life?' and I just don't draw that distinction. The most important thing is that at the end of the night there's something there that wasn't there before. There's a drawing, or there's a piece of lettering, or there's a few more pages of the new book. And I really enjoy being around other people and hanging out and having food and doing all the social stuff that everybody else does too, but it's just not as important to me as getting the work done. That's sort of the great satisfaction. That's how I communicate, and that's how I sort of put myself out into the world.