Monthly Archives: May 2024

The Pencil Eaters Volume 1!

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As mentioned before in this blog, the way I live is that I think of insane things and then I do them. And 2 years ago I had the insane idea of producing a literary journal written entirely by 8–10 year olds. Couldn’t get it rolling last year, but AMAZINGLY it came together this year.

it’s 80 pages long, it’s got poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama, and it’s also illustrated by the kids. It took them over 6 months to create and it took me about 30 hours to slap it into its final form. (I typed their work in Google Docs and laid it out in Photoshop. I made a lot of mistakes (typos and such and apparently lost 2 poems 😔) but I did my best and I think the kids appreciated it.

Obviously, they chose the title.

We celebrated with a release party and literary reading this afternoon. Now I’m thinking about how I can improve it next year. I’m hopefully we can get volume 2 professionally printed because stapling 100 of these things was not fun. But it’s always nice to finish a big project.

16 Little Worlds

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I don’t know what you call this sort of thing. Windows? Tiny pix? To me it feels sort of related to zentangle but it’s obviously different.

I just had this piece of paper that I had folded into thirty-seconds trying to explain something to somebody, and it was sitting on the table next to a golf pencil I had for some reason, and I started to fill in the boxes. I was going to do the other side but it looked like someone had spilled coffee on it, which is weird because I don’t drink coffee.

Anyway a little thing. I’ve been working on a big thing I may share here next week even though it’s not *exactly* mine. I’ll explain later. Or not.

The windows are (left to right, then top to bottom):

  1. The Sonoran Desert
  2. Tropical Island with Hammock
  3. Wetlands
  4. Pine Forest
  5. Flowery Meadow
  6. Rainbow Field
  7. Tree with Garden Swing
  8. The Seashore
  9. Under the Sea
  10. Lush Bike Path
  11. Small Boat on Stormy Ocean
  12. Mountains
  13. Thunderbird
  14. Mushroom Undergrowth
  15. Butterfly Meadow
  16. Turtle

A Sweet Little Elephant

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I recently visited my mother-in-law in her new home and I noticed she had a bunch of elephant pictures on the wall and I was like, “I didn’t know you liked elephants.” (I mean seriously, I have known her for 15+ years; I had no idea she loved elephants. I feel unobservant.)

Like all humans from the great state of Kansas, she also likes sunflowers. I’m pretty sure they don’t even let you rent an apartment in Kansas if you don’t like sunflowers.

Anyway, I had to send her an elephant. The background is watercolor. The elephant is specialty paper. I made the sunflower by cutting petal shapes out of a picture of some other yellow flowers in a magazine.