I've been really working on focusing on one part of a project at a time. It helps prevent the waterfall of emotion that comes with looking at the list of books I want to release over the next five years.
Today, for example, I finished the first draft of a new Stick Figure book. I don't have illustrations yet. I just put text together. I haven't figured out how I'm going to handle quotations because of the way this particular story is set up. But the whole story is laid out finally, in a feasible framework.
Over the next year, I hope to start drawing the characters I expect will be in the story and then illustrating the story as I go through.
I sat back, I enjoyed finishing that draft. I put it away. I'm not interested in dealing with that text until next summer. It can sit on back up until then.
Then I moved onto scanning all the illustrations I created. Unlike other times I've illustrated books, especially books I'm publishing, I didn't need that list. Well guess what, I needed that list.
Illustration problems: you go out of your way and create what you think should at least be 55 original drawings for your written work (which is still in the research phase, but the Illustrations are very important to the final product which in early test phases are probably going to be spread out over two books. You spend an hour scanning these original pieces of art to add into your text after digitally adding color. You count your scanned works in the folder. There are 52. 5 of which you can verify immediately as to what they are illustrations of. The remainder will have to individually be checked off a list you thought you didn't need to create. After this series is released: I need to take some serious time off illustration because this drives me nuts.
I suppose I could always apply and try to get this manuscript taken and published "for real" but I would still have the issues of incomplete data and the fact that everything is just too dense in the real world for the subject matter I create.
Meanwhile, I'm carefully cropping and preparing the illustrations I do have, trying not to go figure out which drawings I'm missing. Who am I kidding? I will be doing that tomorrow.
