Awhile ago I’d had a very promising phone call from the senior editor at the publishing company I would most like to work with, she called just when I was starting to think that they were going to pass on my book and that I should send it out elsewhere. She was very encouraging, but after two months finally came back to tell me that they were going to pass. You can imagine that this was pretty disappointing, but I’ve taken a lot of hope from our phone call and from the fact that this was the first time and the only company that I’ve ever sent anything to, and so at least getting a phone call was a very good sign.

What I’ve been thinking about lately (in terms of failures and successes) is how we feel about, or interpret them. In the two months between the phone call and the eventual rejection I was overcome by a kind of paralysis – when it came to making art all I could think of was picture books and little else. So for two months I was kind of unproductive – well, ok, I did finish writing another picture book and complete almost all the sketches, but that was a kind of back-up in the event of rejection. I did not make one piece of art purely for the enjoyment of it, or one piece of art without any kind of underlying ambition, which is very unusual for me considering how much I like drawing. And maybe because of my move and loving being at home I haven’t been to my studio much either, so I couldn’t shake the feeling that for two whole months I was just pissing my days away. But here’s where I started thinking about the way I feel about things – deep down it bothered me that I was paralyzed but- what’s wrong with a certain slowness to your days, enjoying your new home with its gorgeous mountain views, allowing your contentment to just be? Why does there have to be a striving for something, ambition, or an I should be doing this or I should be doing that?

Its like hockey, too. We played the majority of our spring season with 8 skaters. We kept losing to the point that I was beginning to wonder if I had an inflated sense of how good we were, because I felt like we should have been beating everyone. Last night we had our first playoff game and we played with 8 but I was wonderfully free of emotion. I was hating playing hockey the game before, but last night I had no real feelings about anything, and almost felt like a defensive machine. Seriously, I played so much better for it – sure, there was enough of that wanting-to-win emotion that’s so necessary, but I can play so much better without all the striving. And the getting mad. And we won!

Anyway, the reason they passed was mostly because my book reminded them of another book Fletcher and the Falling Leaves – not so surprising to me because I already talked about its influence, and have I mentioned how much I love Tiphanie Beeke? It was because of her I started using oil pastel. But in the two years since this book started, the illustrations have changed – and I’m going to redraw the whole thing, and remove what really is the most obvious point of comparison between the two books:

From this:

to this:

to this: