Lonely cat from Blue Collar Cat Guy

I wrote the first draft of the text of the book Blue Collar Cat Guy in less than a half hour. The story had been marinating in my mind for a year, the tale of a lonely cat without a home who finds friends and family through a Blue Collar Cat program. What surprised me was the rapid firing from brain to pen of the rhyming lines when I hadn’t even considered rhyming to begin with.

The challenge was not writing the text, but illustrating it. I was not an animal painter or, for that matter, an artist who could paint or draw the same animal over and over, or the same flowers, or houses, or wacky-looking people. True, with a digital program I coud have copied and pasted, but I wanted the base, if you will, of the images to not be perfect, to have less-than-identical, other than flawlessly-shaped, characters and backgrounds. Some illustrations took months, others barely an hour, and many required tracing and retracing, but the heart of the main character and his journey propelled me. Every child wants to belong and can relate to a cat with the same longing, who finds community and purpose, getting past the uncomfortable newness when he arrives at his new home. 

I am happy with most of the text and images. It is time to go digital for the tweaking.

Now the hard parts begin, the searching for an agent and the quest to publish - or self-publish. That is one reason why I created this website, so that others would have a place to be introduced to my books, my artwork, and to me. Feels quite strange and way too personal, though it is not really.

What I have contemplated along the way is the museum-quality, amazing range, of art in children’s books and how the same characters or scenes are portrayed on many different pages. If you want to explore great works of art and you find yourself nowhere near a museum, explore the children’s section of any bookstore. Gorgeous artwork is waiting there.