I kind of phoned this one in because I had very limited time and was kind of distracted and there were 3 bulletin boards to cover before the end of the year. But the breezeway looks nice for the Cub Club kids and summer staff and any prospective families who come tour the school.
Closer views:
And then there was this smaller bulletin board on the other side of the library door:
Somehow or other, I did it again: a literary journal written and illustrated by children. I used tax credit donations to pay for professional printing, which saved me about 5 hours and really provided a superior product. Although these books cost a little more than $7 each to produce. This year we have fiction, poetry, 3 interviews (1 real, 2 not), 4 songs (3 original, 1 a parody of “Eye of the Tiger” called “Nose of the Panther”), a very silly book review, and a lot of drawings is lions, plus a few other things.
Tuesday we had a release party and literary reading. The kids catered it so there were a LOT of cookies. We had about 40 people I’d say, which is not a bad turnout for a literary reading.
If you would like to support the arts and writing programs, you can visit this site: https://www.tusd1.org/donate
Select “Lineweaver Elementary” from the school menu and “Writing Program” from the item menu. If you are an Arizona resident, you can apply this money to your state taxes and even if you’re not a resident it’s still tax deductible.
Whew! That’s a wrap on the black and white pages. I still have the colored pages (front and back cover, inside and outside) to finish, but they’re well underway. Hopefully by the time you see this, they’ll be done as well.
“The Spider from the Darkness” is the story I wrote to replace the second Lorena story, meaning I wrote it well after I wrote the others. However, it was the first page I finished when I started illustrating the comic. I love the water lily and the heart and the spider and the semi-feral girl and the butterflies and even that silly asymmetrical sun, which shouldn’t work, but somehow does.
If all goes well, I hope this comic will be available in print at some point in the near future, and, if possible, I hope I’ll be able to bring it to some nice conference–ALA’s 2026 gathering in Chicago would be my preference–where I can discuss it with other Bonnie Jo Campbell scholars and perhaps entice new readers to The Waters.
If you are among the chosen few who read my unpublished novel The Girl Who Followed Her Own Counsel you might see some parallels between this story and one of the Little Red Riding Hood variants in that novel. The point is: either you grow up or you die. There’s no option where you stay a kid forever no matter what your family does to keep you there. If you keep living, you’re always going to become an adult, and, sad as it is, your grandparents are always going to decline as you rise.
I had what one might call a prolonged childhood, by choice, in which I was able to keep a youthful outlook on everything until I was about 35. Adulthood never really suited me, though, and I’m happy to move on to my crone phase. I’m happy to be a witch. I was never cut out to be a grown up.
Perhaps not coincidentally, my grandmother lived to 96 and only passed away about a year ago, when I was 49. Now I’m grandmother-aged myself. You can’t stop the progression of time. You can’t stop your children from growing up.
The Spirit of the Waters is probably my favorite thing I drew for this comic, which is why she’s going to be a full color feature of the Table of Contents and probably, at some point in the future after this comic is put to bed and after my literary journal release party and hopefully after getting out of jury duty, I hope to make it a sticker. There’s a few images in this comic that would make good stickers.
I’m not confident about a lot but I am confident that this is the best drawing of a knight in shining armor doing battle with an octopus that you are going to see today. I worked really hard on it.
This is the story that’s probably going to do the least for a reader who hasn’t actually read the book, and required the most careful note taking on my part, so I could really get a sense of each of the six “knights” and what they specifically had to be sorry about.
Also, tiny mermaid boobs, tee hee. Always gotta have at least one naked body part in each of these comic books to ensure that I can’t show them to my elementary students.
It was such a big, white space! This one gave me a lot of trouble too, mostly because I needed to fill it up. I drew a bunch of different flowers that I hated and never finished before I got inspired to do these giant stylized dandelion puffs, which are excellent and magical.
Sweet Lorena is probably the most blameless character in the book, even though she certainly has to suffer through the nonsense everyone else creates. The story puts some distance between her and the reader, while marveling at what a standup person she is.
As mentioned previously, I wrote most of these stories in a kind of fugue state, which led to me writing Lorena’s story twice because I forgot I had already written it. I ended up discarding the second one, in which she is characterized as “the strong girl” but has to go through basically this same nonsense. (Rose is a siren in that one.)
After I drew this image, I felt like it wasn’t quite done and then I realized it needed a squirrel laughing at the prince in the tree, so I added that.
I’m very pleased with Princess’s bloody arm in the last panel. I’m afraid that I just couldn’t get a background that I was happy with for either image and gave up. Imagine that these picture are drawn in the royal seer’s dark workshop.
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