Galley Proofs

I'm working on the galley proofs of Holy Croc. Even though it's all low resolution, it's fun to see how the images align with the text. I especially love the typeface that the designer chose to use for the titles. It's as if the words have been chewed on by a friendly crocodile! This image is a screen-cap of my computer desktop, so you can see see some of the smaller thumbnails of stories off to the side. A few of my stories have to be shortened up a wee bit, to fit around the pictures. Otherwise, it's all looking good!

Back Cover Copy

I just got the back cover copy from my editor... exciting!

Holy Crocodile! back cover

Imagine riding across a dangerous river on the back of a friendly crocodile! 

Or making friends with a whole pile of snakes. Or going into hiding with the help of some spiders! 

These are not your everyday saint stories! God used both wild and tame animals to help saints when they needed it most. Here are just a few you’ll find in Holy Crocodile!

• St. Pachome and the friendly crocodile

• St. Colman and the alarming mouse

• St. Brigid and the amazing fox
• St. Cuthbert and the lifesaving sea otters
• And many more!

Told in beautiful illustrations and charming narratives by mixed-media artist Caroline Cory, these stories will delight and inspire young and old alike.

The above text should run somewhere over the body of the croc... this image runs around the book cover.

A Whale of a Story

One of the stories in Holy Crocodile concerns St. Brendan and a whale. The whale in that story is very cooperative with Brendan, even after the saint and his sailors confuse her with an island.

I saw this picture in the paper last week illustrating an article about a whale who exhibited gratitude when humans freed it from fishing nets. The whale story isn't a whopper, as Snopes will testify:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/whalethanks.asp though the image doesn't date to the event in question. In this article it said that, after the whale was free, it began swam up to each diver/rescuer and nuzzling him. The divers said that, while they hated to anthropomorphize too much, it felt like the whale was thanking them.

In the course of looking for this amazing pictures I came across lots of other stories about people freeing whales, including videos of whales jumping for joy after people cut them free from nets. Sadly, it's estimated that fishing nets kill nearly 1,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises a day!

Check out this article from National Geographic for more information about at-risk sea mammals and things that be done to help. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0610_050610_dolphins.html

More fun with art!

When I was scanning my artwork (for my records, not the publisher), I had to stitch together two scans because my scanner bed was too small to do the whole image at once. In the process of playing around with the scans I discovered I could turn them into cool little distorted panoramic movies. I could hold my cursor over them and they would spin over the connected pages. Unfortunately, despite them being in Quicktime format, they don't want to load on this site. I think they are so much fun that I will be posting screen caps from them from time to time. 

The white space you'll see in the drawings is where the text goes. Above is an example of the distorted panoramic image. And below you can see what the original drawing really looks like. This is St. Felix who is being hidden from Roman soldiers by spiders. The distorted one may be way cooler now but, once the text is added, the image down below is going to rock too.

The Book!

I'm looking forward with great anticipation to the publication of my first book, Holy Crocodile! in the spring of 2013. In this blog I'll be running past the publishing process from the author/illustrator side and posting related tidbits as they come along.

Everyone keeps asking if I have a publishing date yet. I don't... beyond spring. But I do have the sample book cover to prove that's it's on track! I love what they did with the font for Crocodile! It's got a nice bitten flavor to it. My feedback and hope is that the publisher shortens the subtitle to "Stories of Animals Helping Saints" or "Stories of Saints and Animals" or something else that takes up a little less room visually -- preferably keeping the subtitle down to one line.