Thoughts, and some Closure...

This blog post is announcing a few epiphanies I had about the book this past week, which all happened out of the blue and mostly within a couple days.

The first thought in my neurotic brain was playing with a particular idea: instead of writing this as just one book (which would be around 145-150 pages), if I should perhaps divide it up into two or three shorter volumes. I seriously considered this for awhile for a few practical reasons related to marketing, publishing costs and overall aesthetics of approaching it as a "series"of sorts. Having at least one book out while working on another could be advantageous in many ways, but then again, it would still be a good idea to just put everything I know I have now into one solid piece of work as originally intended.

I have decided, however, to keep all of the illustrations as black & white. All of the completed ones are in B&W already, but my original vision was to have at least 4 or 5 of the poems spread out in the book with color illustrations. But now, also for practical and aesthetic reasons, I’m feeling it would give the book more consistency to keep a unified look throughout, and also bring the printing costs down considerably. (But we’ll have some nice splashes of color on the cover!)

That being said, this weekend I came to a jubilant sense of closure in finishing the illustrations for Baby Elephant and the Cranky Monkey, a story which began over 12 years ago as an animated film and was left unfinished. Completing these drawings for its resting place as a poem in this book is a real gift, which gives me a happy feeling much like the elephant himself in this little sneak-peek detail.  More to come...