Doodling and Considering a Change of Direction -- Books for Adult Readers

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Doodle using my custom Photoshop colored pencil brush

Lately I’ve been thinking about how I want to spend my “art” time. I’m currently working on a six-part series of children’s picture book about the adventures of Jimmy Jay. It’s been a long trudge uphill. It took me a year to do the first book and nine months to do the second. I had a clear idea for my third book and I was confident that I’d be able to finish it in three months. That three-month deadline passed two months ago.

My assumption that I could complete the book in three months hinged on one thing — that I wouldn’t be working at my real world job. But, shit happens, and they needed me. And, the money was good. So I took the job thinking that I would be able to put in a full day’s work for the company, and then pivot to working on my book after hours. Despite my optimism, it didn’t happen that way. After 8 hours of hacking code five days a week, my brain was fried. I had less than an hour each day to work on my book, and it takes me that long, on a good day, to warm up my art muscles.

So, the book fell behind and worse, the quality of my drawing fell off. I realized that working at a full-time job would mean that book three would also take a year to complete.

All of these events got me to thinking that I may never make a living doing comix and children’s books. If that’s the case, I might as well just work on something that I’ve been putting aside for many years. That something is my chaotic life living in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district the year before the Summer of Love turned San Francisco upside down. It’s a bewildering story that I never imagined would happen to me. But, it did. I

I’ll see how I feel about all of this when I recover from my physical injuries, which are contributing to the deep philosophizing I’ve been doing for the last few days.