On a Mission

On a Mission

“You sound like a man on a mission.” A good friend of mine said that in a recent email. The comment came on the heels of my email full of the trials and tribulations of preparing two books for publication, that is, for self-publication. Actually, all the problems and numerous details involved with both books have pretty much dominated my mind and energy for the past three months, and it’s the main reason I haven’t written anything for the blog for several weeks. One simply can’t do all one would like to, and some off time is important too. And some of the people I regularly exchange emails with are losing patience with my carrying on time and time again about Eros AND PSYCHE and BRIDGE IN THE FOG, like some fanatic who is more obsessed than he realizes. My cousin back in Racine is letting me know she misses my usual email, where I write about various things. People have to understand that getting these books ready for publication is the culmination of essentially twenty years work. I have written each book three times and certain sections up to ten times. Plus there was a lot of drawing over those years—and I had a full time job up until 2003. Retirement and the time I now had helped me turn the corner and turbo-charged me for the remaining laps to the finish line. In any case, it was a long slog and a long time coming to fruition.

The gal I am working with at ALPHAGRAPHICS is sweet and very supportive but she has gotten confused about the order of images in the book. She sent me home Monday with the third sample of the EROS AND PSYCHE, wanting my opinion of the reproduction of the drawings, which had been too dark. The other chore I had was to correct about a dozen minor grammatical errors and I did all that. I was happy with all the drawings too, all but the two that were reduced in size in the introduction. Monday afternoon I brought in the two original drawings for them to scan anew and we have our fingers crossed that will make the difference. When I went through the third sample to my horror I found a drawing missing; it was the self-portrait with the woman coming out of my skull with me balancing a mandala on my right forefinger. It’s important because the commentary has a direct relationship to the image. The problem was in putting it back in where it was suppose to be not only altered the pagination, it left a blank page. My solution to that was to add another drawing, which is what we did. It will be the only case of two images side by side, but it comes in the middle of the book so I think it’ll work okay. I chose the one with clown on a runway with a dark and a light lady attending his act, which should fit right in with no problem.

So if the two reduced drawings are better than before we will be ready to print.