Saturday, June 9, 2012

STRAWBERRIES AND DEADLINES

As I sorted through a basket of organic strawberries the other day, I thought of a strawberry experience from many years ago.  I had signed a contract for a dream book project: Wendy Watson's Mother Goose.  Before this, the books I had illustrated were almost all 32 pages in length.  A few were 48 pages; one or two were 64 pages.  But the Mother Goose would be 150 pages in length, almost all of those pages heavily illustrated.  After signing the contract, I kept putting off the project.  It was going to take so much time...where to begin...how to go about it.  Five years went by.  I still hadn't started on the Mother Goose.  
Then one morning I experienced a reckoning:  was this book ever going to come into existence?  Or was I going to allow it to die on the vine?  On top of that, visions of having to return the contractual advance danced through my head.  Of course I was going to illustrate it!  I set up a "schedule of completion."  My quota was one double-page spread per working day.  Five working days a week.  Fifteen weeks total.  I work slowly, and this schedule was going to be impossible for me.  But somehow I had to do it.
It was strawberries that saved the day.  Strawberry shortcake, to be more exact.  Even more exact---strawberry shortcake with homemade biscuits and heavy cream.  Each night of those one hundred and fifty working days, I ate strawberry shortcake for dessert.  As I labored through each double-page spread, I knew that strawberry shortcake was waiting for me when I had finished.  It was the only thing that enabled me to complete that wonderful project.  

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

STRAWBERRIES AND PUBLISHING

Strawberries aren't the way they used to be.  
But I still love them.
So I keep buying them and eating them.
Writing and illustrating and publishing books for children isn't the way it used to be, either.  But I still love it all.  Even more than strawberries.  So I keep doing it.