It’s been a year since my last post, and what a year it’s been! Peace in the Middle East, President Obama back in the driver’s seat, that crazy giant fan they erected that seems like it might put an end to global warming — who would’ve thought that would work?

Erm… no. But we won’t dwell.

Looking back at my last post, I can see how it was a bit of a cliffhanger: Woman torches website of prominent organization… and then… nothing. Was she fired? Now living on the streets? Bumped off? Nah — as far as drama goes, it was a complete nonstarter. Got the site finished. Client happy. Got paid. Yawn. Plenty of other humiliations small and large since then.

But this blog is really only about my humiliations in one realm: “art.” And here, as with the world at large right now, there’s been both big changes and a feeling of constant stasis.

Over a year ago, I wrote about my classes at The Art Academy, and how after months of painting only in greyscale, we still had not yet been introduced to color. Well, that was a year ago! Now, after another year of weekly classes (up to, of course, a couple of months ago) we’re finally there! Color!

Well, one color. Brown.

One of the frustrating things I’ve found about classes at the Art Academy is the lack of a transparent agenda. Clearly they have a method. I’m now one table up from the kids’ table and I can see that nothing is winged: There are the same compositions of Dopey and the Oven Mitt, the same story about Jim’s sister and her school dance dress. But we, the students. are completely in the dark about where we’re headed. Thus it was that after endless weeks of painting and repainting the same ghastly grey head, my friend Becky finally reached the precipice — she was given a list of colors to buy and told to come in the next week with 16 toned canvasses. Oh, the excitement! We were all grey with envy. But alas, those 16 toned canvasses were fated not for great masterworks of color, but for the next stage of the mysterious process: underpaintings. An endless slog of single-color copies of NC and Andrew Wyeths, designed to break us down until only the strong are left standing. (Or maybe it’s to teach us about value. But I don’t know, do I?)

And now we’re in a pandemic, and I’m stalled out painting in one single, dark color. Pretty frickin symbolic, no?

I needed something else.

Have you ever heard of the Midnight Disease? It may or may not have been coined in Michael Chabon’s great novel about the creative life, “Wonder Boys” — at least that’s where I heard it. To quote Chabon:

“The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.”

Not sure if you’ve experienced the midnight disease? You haven’t experienced the midnight disease.

Before these last few weeks, it had been awhile for me. 2016. I know that, because I recently dug up the picture book manuscripts I’d written back then, and once again those dang manuscripts started rattling around in my head like “a fly trapped in a Coke bottle,” waking me up in the middle of the night, and sending me to my computer early, early, early — this time not to fiddle with the story, but to attempt to illustrate them. Myself. (You did see Dopey and the Oven Mitt, didn’t you?)

Now, I’m not someone who really loves kids. I mean, they’re fine. Whatevs. But the picture book form is so… elegant. It’s poetry, really (even if it’s not!) — every word has to be carefully chosen, every image has to advance the story, every character needs to express his emotion clearly enough for a nonreader. What an incredibly fulfilling challenge for someone who loves both art and writing!

But I do realize that I’m not the only one who feels that way. Thousands of actual artists and writers want to publish a picture book. I’ve seen the work of some incredibly talented people who somehow have never managed to get published.

It makes my stomach hurt a little.

And I also know from experience, because I sent out several of these same stories to agents years ago, and heard… nothing. And looking back at them again, I still like many of them. I’m not going to be convinced that they’re not good stories. Sending them out into the void and getting no feedback whatsoever was enough of a crotch-kick that I stopped writing them completely.

So I know. You don’t have to look at me that way.

I’ve created the first of 5 or so illustrations I’ll do for this first story, about a dandelion with big aspirations, and her naysayer neighbors (that would be YOU). I’ll continue to post as I go along, along with resources and things that I learn along this new path.

Back soon!