We’ve decided that it would be nice if we did a weekly update of what exactly we do here at Bobbledy Books. Just a little look into the various projects we’re working on, what being a writer and illustrator and independent book publisher is all about – that sort of thing. We work on so many different projects at any given time that we pretty much forget we’ve done them as soon as they’re done. So, in an effort to remind ourselves – here it is: The Week at Bobbledy Books.

First off, I was in New York City last weekend. I went to attend the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Arts (MoCCA) Festival, which is basically a room full of people making cool books – most of which have pictures and words in them. Usually Matthew and I have a table there and we spend all our time selling books, but since this year Matthew got tickets to the Final Four, we gave up our table to a more deserving and dedicated vendor who would scoff at the idea of passing up a spot at MoCCA to go to the Final Four. The show was great, I forgot to bring my camera, my friend Kenan won an award of excellence for his most excellent Last Train to Old Town comic. Also, and perhaps most importantly, I got to eat some tasty chinese food (the sort that is not to be had in Chestertown), and got this fortune in my fortune cookie:

Well. I certainly wasn’t feeling ready to take on the world. I hung my fortune up with my best fortunes of all time:

I put them on my computer monitor so I can look at them all day long. “You should be able to make money and hold on to it” (I like the “should” construction, as it is true that anyone SHOULD be able to do that). “Your dearest dream is coming true” (surrounded by smiley faces). “Your flair for the creative takes an important place in your life” (nice that they call it a “flair”). “You will make a sudden rise in life” (slightly terrifying). “A good time to start something new” (also surrounded by smiley faces – and received just before Alden was born). “You are offered the dream of a lifetime. Say yes!” (YES!!!).

So, given that my most recent fortune suggested I ought to be ready to take on the world, some life organization was in order. When Matthew returned from Kansas City/Atlanta, we sat down to try to organize our lives. Which meant putting together a schedule.

And printing it up nicely on fancy paper and cutting it out nicely:

This took a whole day, which is exactly why we need a schedule.

Once we got that taken care of, we were feeling much better prepared. Onward!

We decided for the first time ever to take out an actual advertisement in an actual magazine. When we were at AWP, the booth next to ours belonged to Brain,Child magazine – a magazine for mothers that isn’t really a parenting magazine so much as a magazine about parenting (the difference being the marked absence of “Top 10 How-To” lists and an interest in celebrating diverse ways of being a mom). Anyway, we liked the magazine, we liked the folks running it, and we thought we’d dip our toes in the giant muckity lake of advertising with them. So, a good part of last week and the beginning of this week was taken up with designing our ad, which will take up the entire back cover of the summer issue. Wowza! Dipping our toes with a splash!

So – here it is (after much hemming and hawing and many failed attempts…):

Matthew and I worked on this together over the phone while he was still in Kansas City/Atlanta. It’s harder to work that way, but at least no one is breathing down my neck when I’m making lots of bad design decisions. After he got back we did the final tweaks and sent it off to the printer’s on Thursday.

Our next Bobbledy project is going to be the album of music by Drew. He has sent us all of the music files so we know what’s going on the album. But there’s the problem of actually having to name the album. We went through a lot of names – most of them directly from the songs: “Chase the Falafel” – “Roll, Dust Bunny Roll” – “A Perfectly Romulan Day” (edit: Drew just wrote me to tell me that it was supposed to be “A Perfectly Cromulent Day”. See HERE) – “Banana Kazoo” – “Juggle Mosquitos” – “Ground Hog” – “Where Does it Go?” – “Give Abraham Lincoln a Call” – among others. We THINK we’ve finally settled on “I Don’t Wanna Brush My Teeth” (though I am still partial to “A Perfectly Romulan Day”).

And then I started trying to draw something.

Yuck. Hated it. Too mucky. Not terribly interesting.

I liked it, Matthew hated it. I’m a sucker for red, and monsters, but Matthew insisted it was much too hard to read, and then what was the deal with the weird eyeless monster? Also, too much white.

We came up with this idea of the words being broken up by a giant smiling mouth:

Which I also hated but Matthew insisted was good. It felt like the background needed to be a little more deliberate, not just a bunch of flat texture. Inspired a bit by Keith Haring (check out his site for kids – old school but fun), I thought maybe some kind of pattern made up of a bunch of little objects might be fun.

Okay. We were getting closer, but the colors were all wrong and it wasn’t quite there. We tried LOTS of different color combinations.

We finally settled on red and orange, and rearranged the title so Drew’s name could actually be on the album (whoops! how could we have forgotten that?!).

Much better. Then Matthew pointed out that all those shapes stuck together and formed kind of a monster, with his arms up in the air and his legs going to either side of Drew’s name.

See?

Look at that! So my job for next week is to draw all those little orange bits into the shape of that monster. And voila – even though I lost the initial battle of the red monster with no eyes, I still got my red, and I still got my monster. Check and mate.

And the final thing we worked on this week was keeping our flat table clean:

This might be the hardest project of all, but so far this week we’ve been successful. Our desks have suffered, but just waking up and looking over into the studio in the morning to see that clean flat table makes us both feel ready to take on the world.

Here’s hoping next week is as productive.