Pigeons in my Book

There is nothing quite like a little bit of pressure to finish work. I have been working sporadically for two years on my book You Look Great! Making Invisible Disease Visible. Many things got in the way of completing this, both visible and invisible. There was the problem of managing disability itself, with sluggish downtimes and time consuming medical appointments. Then there was the daily distraction of household and property maintenance, as well as my sometimes "real job" of producing art work for galleries that may or may not actually sell it.

The biggest delay in writing my book was the fact that there were two other incomplete books in the pipeline ahead of this one. But those are finished now and I am in the process of sending them out to prospective publishers, getting them back again, and then sending them back out to different places. At my age it is basically a mechanical process.

I actually have two or three other incomplete manuscripts but they will go on the furthest back burner. My incomplete part memoir/part medical adventure/big part illustration text looms over me. This is where applying just a little bit of pressure comes in. A short article for the Mayo Clinic will be published this fall. In this article I casually mention my work on You Look Great! Making Invisible Disease Visible. It helps make the goal of finishing this a bit more real.

I have begun setting a bit of time each day to write and work on illustrations. This last one, Piezogenic Pigeons from the chapter "Barrier Beasts." The rocks were drawn mostly from life and on location in Norway. Loved the vacation but allowed a little bit of pressure to intrude in order to bring my book illustration to life.