How's This for a Cover?

Ramping Up This Project Again

Vicki Johnson, drawing by
nephew Jeff Anderson

Since my last entry (March 2013) my wife was put on hospice (April), lingered for months (till August), I did vigil during her final week, and she passed away Sept. 1, 2013. My anguish need not concern this blog other than to say the grief and absurdity and senselessness of her death is beyond belief. To honor her memory, eight months after her passing, I once again ramp up my efforts to complete this graphic novel, Ecclesiastes U. Vicki would want that.

To review, the purpose of this blog is threefold: to help me think, to hold me accountable, and to document both my process and my progress.

Another hoped for by-product, to understand the creative process. Even if the finished project is a flop aesthetically, financially, philosophically, or theologically, it is still a massive undertaking and being the student of creativity that I am, I hope to discover while writing and drawing this book the keys to creativity, the obstacles to writer's/artist's block, and the mental disciplines necessary for finishing a project of this magnitude.

For example, I know that some artists love working in chaos. Not me. I require clear psychic decks, tidy categories, neat piles, tools within easy reach, and reference materials at my finger tips.

On an even deeper level, before returning to this project I needed to ransack 40 years of journals, files, memoirs, drawings, sketchbooks, invention journals, and itemize all my undone projects, started but unfinished manuscripts, rough drafts of plays, poems, songs, sculptures, half done drawings, posters, wheels, businesses, memoirs, letters, handouts, and games.

It took several weeks but doing so was liberating. As David Allen says in Getting Things Done, you can't know how much to take on until you know how much you've taken on. My Catalog of Creativity lists over 125 projects I'd like to complete before I die. After pondering that list for a week I sifted out the probably-nevers, maybe-nevers, someday-maybes, and must-do priorities. Ecclesiastes U is a must-do priority (for reasons I may describe here some day).

I've also un-boxed piles and piles of EU rough drafts, am sifting through them, and arranging them into manageable drafts. Not sure if this is how others work but discrete piles help me visualize the whole project and how all the parts fit together.

In other news, I'm back to work 3/4 time, adjusting to living alone, and am eager to dedicate my mind to this task as therapy.

Last year I completed about 35 pages (I've lost track; haven't checked yet) which represents the graphic novelization of Ecclesiastes chapters 1 and 2. I got the brainstorm to get that book into print ASAP as the first of 6 projected titles. There are twelve chapters in Ecclesiastes so this will make the finished project manageable.


I've long forgotten what all the buttons on GIMP software do, how to add gradations, scanning sizes, and a thousand other little details. I hope the relearning curve will not be too steep.

While working on EU I'll continue to blog on my other sites and collect data for the other works in progress I've got going (this is a habit I can't break).


Two months after my wife's funeral I moved my mom to Florida and took a leisurely one month train ride home, stopping in famous museums as I went. I describe that trip here. It was visual overload the whole time for this befuddled griever, so you'll have to forgive me when I tell you I did not take photos of the Art Speigleman exhibit at the Jewish Museum. (Maybe they wouldn't allow photos, I don't remember).

When I try to describe what it was like standing in front of every original page of Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel MAUS words fail me. But I'll try. I was stunned, giddy, speechless, awed. My mouth went dry and my palms got sweaty. Saying it was a spiritual experience sounds cheezy. But there was something going on in my fertile cerebrum that was ineffible, noetic, and transcendent. Speigelman's creative output was? Was? Was? Inspirational! I returned home determined to follow in his footsteps.

There are other developments in the evolution of this therapist turning graphic essayist, novelist, cartoonist. But they'll have to wait. This blog post is already way too long.

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Page 23

If I were to create a chart on which one could measure the increase of completed pages, we'd note that with page 23 a milestone has been reached: the end of chapter 1 of Ecclesiastes. The work ahead is still unfathomable yet when I see how far I've come in a month (1/12th of the journey complete) I'm encouraged.

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