Posts
"Miss Maddie"
9X11
oil
This will be a short post. At least I
think it will be. I have been very busy this week with my 8-year-old
granddaughter. She had the notion that we should write a children's book
together. She would provide (for the most part) the story, and I would
do the illustrations. And now you know why I've been a little remiss
with my posting.
Like
many things in life, it seemed such a simple idea. And it started out
to be just that. Simple. The story came together pretty quickly. We
collaborated. I typed. Then came the illustrations. That started out
simple as well. Until my inner perfectionist kicked in. One day last
week we drove all the way to the big city (Tyler...not remotely a big
city btw, for those of you who don't know) to pick up a few markers of varying values. Yes...of course they
were professional grade. But I can use them again. Right?
Even
so, I worked on the illustrations off-and-on all week and it came
together pretty nicely. She did a couple of illustrations too, but she
was smarter about it. She just did simple, child-like sketches and they
turned out great.
The
problem was putting it all together in order to make copies. It
involved - as you can imagine - a lot of cutting and pasting...and
printing out each page in order to fit in the illustrations. We went to
Office Depot, and I went to work on my cutting and pasting, only to
discover that I was missing a page. Back home. Printing out another
page, then reconfiguring the rest of the pages in order to accommodate
for the change of having added a page. Sigh...followed by bad thoughts
and words in my head. Thoughts and words not appropriate for an
8-year-old.
But we finally got it together. She's hocking these things shamelessly to anyone with $5 and a soft spot for
children.
She's very driven. She's saving money to move to Madagascar when she's
grown up. I don't know what that says about her feelings toward her
family, including me, but there it is. Madagascar. She's saving up in order to move far, far away. But then, the best laid plans can change.
I guess this wasn't such a short post after all...
