Reasons to Ban This Book!

It's Banned Books Week, and the Internet has a good number of lists outlining the reasons why so many classic books have been banned over the ages.

A few noted examples here:
12 Crazy Reasons Why Books Have Been Banned

15 Classic Children's Books That Have Been Banned in America


In order to protect the fragile minds of your children, here are several reasons why you should encourage your schools and libraries to ban my book...before it's even published!

- Encourages belief in gnomes and is insulting to real-life manufacturers of dairy products. 

- Encourages sympathy for cranky monkeys and fear of cats. 

- Trees don't really talk. 

- Kids will have nightmares about people and creatures with frightening faces, dark knights, trolls, towel monsters, witches in their attics, and a little man with red teeth. 

- May inspire a sense of wonder and more time outdoors, exposing yourself to harmful UV rays from the sun and loss of revenue to those who build electronic devices. 

- Poetry is not practical. 

Write to someone and stop me before it's too late!

Feature on Story Warren

I was very honored to recently have my illustrated poem Success featured on a favorite website of mine: Story Warren, which celebrates and encourages holy imagination in children's literature. It's a fantastic hub for poetry, short stories and resources for keeping the flame of inspiration going. Many thanks to S.D. Smith for the kind invitation to participate in this inspiring community!

Visit and follow Story Warren here!  Your life will be all the richer for it.

I am now balancing my time working on the book with a freelance animation gig this Fall, plus my usual adventures in teaching, family, dragon-slaying and my secret identity. But never fear, I shall continue to post updates as they happen.  

Dummy Book: Version 1

Over the Labour Day Weekend I hit a pretty exciting milestone in the book's journey. I printed out all the pages I had already laid out in the computer, and started the process of figuring out which order they should go in. I also did this so I can see ahead of time what it will potentially look like as a physical book, with actual pages side by side. I could experiment with putting certain pages next to each other and see which illustrations (or pages with only text) look best alongside each other. It's a much different aesthetic than just looking at separate pages in Photoshop.

This first run at a physical "dummy book" is about twice as thick as it will be in final form, since none of the sheets are double-sided yet. It's also a bit larger, being printed on regular 8.5 x 11 paper (the actual book is intended to be 8x10) But overall I think I've come up with a good idea for the order and flow of the poems so far. The cover is still a rough mock-up and could go through some design changes.

But until then, here's a sneak peek at a few pages of the dummy book, which I'm very excited about.