Inking and Coloring

Hi All,

Where did the months go?  And how quickly!  The kids and I left for the Philippines back in May and that somehow stalled the project.  We also moved to Davis (California) in July and life has been pretty busy since then.

But onward we go.

I had to struggle a bit more with the manuscript.  I was seized with the sudden desire to keep the manuscript (really) short and tight.  I went slashing here and there and must have reduced the word count by half.  Andrew was dismayed when he got the FINAL manuscript.  He said I took out all the fun from the book.  He asked me to think about the drastic changes before he proceeded with his illustrations.  He was nice about it, though.  I valued his opinion so I once again did some soul searching:  who is this book for?  why am I writing it?  etc. etc.  It took me a while but eventually I did finalize the manuscript.  There's no going back now.

Since then, Andrew has been working on the colors.  I got to see all the mini pages loosely colored.  It felt so weird (yes, that's the best I can describe the experience!) to see the book coming together even more.  I know I said this before when I saw the line drawings arranged together in a book form.  I guess each phase just brings us closer to the final book and I am feeling very excited to be seeing the end of each phase.

And so we are off to inking and then coloring.  Below is a preview or sample page.  This is probably about 90% done.

I've also been doing my research on printing options and costs.  When I first started looking into various printers, I was overwhelmed by the options.  Fortunately, Janet Del Mundo, the same person who generously shared with me with her expertise on everything related to children's book publishing, gave me some leads on printers.  I'm pretty confident that the printer I'm going to be using will churn out quality books as they print for big publishers like the (ex) Children's Book Press.

Also, yes, we are getting ready to raise funds.  I spoke too soon in my last post back in April.  We are now targeting a publication date sometime in early 2015.  This time frame gives us about 3 months, until December this year, to finish the illustration and fundraise.  We hope to print and publish sometime in the first three months of 2015.  So please please consider contributing!  More on fundraising soon.

Thanks for the continued support.  Please check again for updates.