It's Time to Fly

As mentioned here and there over the past year, I have been working on a picture book. My first. It has been a challenge getting these reluctant birds off the ground, but in recent weeks I have made good progress. And hey! I'm excited that the story is, at long last, coming together.



Storyboarding the manuscript has proven more thought-consuming task than I had previously imagined. Where to start a sentence? Where to end it? What happens on the next page? And the next? Where in the story do the page breaks belong? How do I keep my reader turning and turning to find out what happens next? And more importantly: How do I fill an entire book with the same herons and still keep it interesting, different from spread to spread?



I'm not sure I have all the right answers to that right now. I must remind myself that these are thumbnail sketches, not finished masterpieces. It is tempting to go into feather-by-feather detail with each little 2-inch-high drawing. I tend to get lost in minutiae. When I do I must catch myself and force myself to step back into the big picture. A wider, less meticulous marker has come in handy.



This book has become somewhat of a "Kate Garchinsky's Opus." I first observed these lanky, prehistoric-looking birds over the summers of 2000-2004 at my ex-husbands's family's house in Avalon, New Jersey. Yellow-crowned night herons nested right outside the bedroom windows. I took hundreds of photos with my old-school SLR. I watched and observed several broods hatch, grow and fledge. I wrote the first draft one day in July 2005, shortly before moving to Colorado. It was, at the time, symbolic of the unknown journey that lay before me.



When I arrived in Colorado, the mountains quickly became part of me, and I grew distant from the herons of Avalon--but they never left my mind. As my life here changed, so did my marriage. Eventually I found myself out on my own in the land of snow and pine siskins. I had bought a new computer around that time and during the migration of data from one hard drive to the other, I stumbled an unfamiliar Word document, "Time to fly.doc." I hadn't read it in 3 years and until I opened it, had no idea what it was. The story found me exactly when I needed it.



Rereading a year ago, the words had new meaning. When I had written it I was learning to fly away from my birth nest of Pennsylvania. Three years later I was in the process of leaving the nest of my mate. And now a year has past and my life requires that I fly once more. Spring migration has begun. While my current nest has offered comfort and respite through storms and blizzards, I know that it is time. I've come full circle, and it is time once again to fly.



While I prepare for my next journey, I'll post whatever progress I make here. My goal is to have all storyboards and at least one finished watercolor illustration complete for submission before I take wing.

Sneak Peek

I've been working on a painting that will hopefully make it into greeting card format before the holiday. If not, I'll just have a nice little wintry painting. The sketch above is a little teaser from my Moleskine. I'm completing the finished piece in watercolor, 20" x 16".

The birds, the snow, the icicles, my dogs, the trees, the mountains--these have been my personal solace in what has turned out to be a very challenging time for me. Sometimes life throws unexpected kinks into what you thought was a very well ironed-out plan. There is no way to prepare yourself for these shifts and changes. You may even have believed that you were prepared for them, should they ever happen. But no, you were not. The point of these challenges is not preparation; their purpose is to take you by surprise, shake you around, throw all your pieces up into the air and give you a chance to rearrange, realign. Find your meaning as you evaluate each little torn up piece. You pick yourself, tape it all together again. The result is not a new you but rather a fortified you. One that knows it can be shaken, deconstructed, and still come back together in one piece, stronger than before.

Cryptic, I know. It is to me too.

In my own piecing together I have noticed a few things. I have been feeling very poetic. My senses have awakened to the little details; the swishy sound of snow beneath my skis. The taste of dry powder versus heavy wet snow. The movement of an individual flake as it floats down and lands on my glove, where at just the right angle I can see all of its crystalline facets in the light of a street lamp. The smell of wet pine smoke rising from chimneys. The feel of cold below zero as it freezes the tiny hairs in my nostrils. I become overwhelmed by it all and scratch lopsided verses in my journal until I drift off to sleep.

TGIF

You know what I would like to do this weekend?

Good because I don't.

At my lunch meeting today, my friend/client asked me, "so what have you been up to? What you do last weekend?"

My mind went blank.

Of course, of course, it was our anniversary and we had a wonderful fancy dinner and I bought clothes and we watched football at the Pub. It was a great weekend. How much of that did I remember?

Nothing.

My mind is in overdrive and I need to get into neutral. If only for the weekend.

Illustration Friday: "I Spy..."

Click to enlarge

This was a scene from one of my walks with Maggie last week. I stopped when I heard a very noisy squirrel scolding us for walking by his tree. As I usually do when no one's watching, I greeted the squirrel.

"Hello little squirrel, sorry to bother you."

A split second later he had scurried down the tree and approached us, seemingly curious. He moved inch by inch closer so that he was just atop the snowbank in front of us. Maggie didn't notice until I said something.

"Maggie, where's the squirrel?"

Expecting her to lunge for it, I held her leash tighter. But instead of trying to pursue a chase, the two of them just stood there, looking at each other. It was quite comical. After a minute or two of the standoff, the squirrel retreated into the trees.