Yeah, summer is pretty much over. So I am be back spending time with my best friend – my computer.
I have lots to talk about and several new books that will be coming out. Of course Earthling! is out now, but for the time being it’s back to picture books for me, with two I have written and will be drawing and a few more that I will be illustrating.
The funny thing about working in books – today I am getting final art ready on a book that won’t be released until October of 2013 and I am editing a book that won’t be released until spring of 2014. And the book I am writing now…if it sells…well…Maybe it would be released in 2016?
When a book is finally released it’s like a visit from a time machine. An opportunity to see what I was writing/drawing/thinking/painting two or three years previous. It’s also a powerful testament to the passage of time. Did I write that 4 years ago, I ask myself. Is that possible? The books operate on a different timeline. They ebb and flow more closely with a geological sense of scale. Writing a book, selling it, editing it, making a dummy, generating final art, developing a cover for it…these things don’t happen in a week. Or often even in a year. The book orbits my existence. Dentist visits, family difficulties, flat tires, paying property taxes, these things fly about like gnats eating away at your awareness and vitality on an always accelerating basis. But the book plods along. Notes, corrections, edits, proofs…it’s a schedule that unifies my life now. Allows me to see through the trees to the forest beyond. I feel so lucky to be doing what I am doing it’s almost silly.
But now it’s back to work as my daughter heads back to school. The rains will be here shortly and the days will be short. Soon enough I’ll wonder where those summer days went.
It is like viewing a time capsule. You’re so right.
Better way to put it! They are time capsules. When I get the first copies of an actual book after a year or more it’s an exciting experience. But it’s also contemplative.