The last few days I've been trying to apply my animation training to the creation of my book. I printed out a copy of the text to the book and started a rough storyboard process to flesh out the look of each page:

The drawings are rough, but exciting. The excitement drives the creativity and vice-versa. I've been so careful with the rough sketches of the composition of each page (careful for myself, anyway) that I'm surprising myself the with patience in the process.

I've been keeping design in the back of my mind. It seems that the design aspect and my history with character training impedes on my ability to complete full projects. I've decided to start with the things I consider less interesting and find the excitement there to fuel the fire for the entire project.

The Mommy Test

Today I took the scribbled rough draft from my sketchbook and typed it into the computer. That transition itself changed a lot of the sequencing of events in the story. Who Adan first meets, how many of what kind of animal he encounters. So many things were altered in just two pages of size 12 Times New Roman characters.

Now comes the splendor of peer editing. Luckily for me, most of my friends have children who are around 3 years of age (my approximate target audience.) Unluckily for me, they are friends, and so far they think that what I have written is "just great!" Which is awesome because they're being so supportive, but not-so-awesome for the critic in me.

For right now I'm happy just sitting on the story and working more on design for the book.

Tonight I whipped up a rough draft for the story part of the book.

It was interesting for me to have spent the latter half of my 27 years on this earth trying to over-think and be analytical about everything, and then to have to suddenly simplify my thoughts for a pre-school age audience. I was trying to make the book subtly educational, but continued to reach the point where the simplicity couldn't be maintained.

For example, Adan the Tiger meets a turtle. On several of the first drafts, I was cemented in the idea that Adan would somehow discover how long turtles were expected to live. But in every draft of the story, the way in which Adan had to find out such facts exceeded the acceptable amount of time for even an adult to pay attention.

I went from an elaborate storyline where Adan's discoveries rivaled those of marine biology graduate students, to combining basic colors and numbers into his adventure. Even then the simple beginning and end of the story of a lost tiger cub seems frayed, open-ended, and unbelievable. How is it that I'm going to write a book about a talking tiger, but I can't get over the fact that he learns about colors and numbers while lost in the jungle?

I suppose today's brain-wrenching activity was just the first of many as I embark on my journey into motherhood.