Back in 2015, Sarah self-published Sylvan Dreaming, a book of her poetry. She asked me to illustrate it, and how could anyone say no to such a charming individual? I may be biased, but I think the poetry is excellent. Recently coming upon a copy of this book, and the other titles that follow, I toyed with the idea of posting them here. I was averse at first since I felt it would come across as rather repellant bragging. But then I admitted this little footling blog exists only for my rampant ego anyway, so why not? So, if anyone should stumble upon this post, I ask you to both excuse and indulge me in the following unbridled display of conceit.
First, the illustrations for this title weren't as bad as I remembered. I wouldn't call them good, mind you, but I feel they're not as bad as they might have been. As always, the colors did not reproduce well at all. I don't know if I'm the problem or if it's the computer or a combination of the two. I can overlook that, though, since I'm used to it and, besides, the poetry is so good that the horribly colored accompanying illustrations can't detract from it.
Sarah's next book, also published in 2015, is Mystic Dreaming. Again, the poetry is great, the illustrations could have been better and the coloring could have been a lot better. But now a new problem has raised its ugly head. For some reason, Sarah changed the illustrations' dimensions. Maybe (I can't recall now) I used a different size paper than used for the previous book's pictures, so the image didn't fit as nicely. They're very elongated and distorted, as if seen in a funhouse mirror. A fantastic artist and friend of the family, Mr. Gene Lehman, who also is a computer whiz, worked his computer magic to resize all the images, so they would fit on the page and not be warped. Alas, Sarah never used Gene's corrected images; thus, the book's great poetry is sadly accompanied by ridiculous-looking drawings.
The next book, published in 2017, is Kathy's retelling of a folktale and is titled Marriage of a Mouse. Again, I might be a trifle prejudiced, but I think she did a great job! The cover only has the title with no art, so I used the title page for its image. As for my drawings, unlike Sarah's books where the drawings have their own pages, this one has the text and drawing sharing the same page. Frankly, this made the illustrations too small and, if I remember correctly, there were only a few book sizes offered by the printer, which left a lot of white space. Still, since the book is for little children and is about little mice, perhaps it's all right the images are tiny.
Now, I'm showing the last book out of sheer vanity and gross conceit. It's a series of attempted spooky stories and I wrote it myself. I used the pen name Quillin Potter since other Jeff Potters had books out. The book has no illustrations. I must have proofread that book a billion-billion times and it's still overrun with errors, such as misusing "traverse" and "transverse" and "vertical" for "horizontal." And don't get me started on wild punctuation, syntax and grammar! Maybe I was so obsessed with trying to sound like Edgar A. Poe or H.P. Lovecraft that I wasn't paying enough attention to anything else.
For fun, I checked Amazon's website to see if they still carry these titles. They do! But then, the books are print-on-demand. I was surprised with how expensive they are. But then I recalled each book had to have a minimum price for the printer to at least break even.
And that's it! There's no reason for this post. As I said, I posted this just out of gross vanity ... I guess just like I did with all its sisters.
