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My poetry book And Then There Were Eight: Poems About Space might be inaccurate already or soon. Some poems it contains are silly and are not intended to be factual, like this one:



Here, Girl!

She rolls
   and roams
      and wags her tail
She never needs to see the vet


I love her
   silver
      shiny coat
She's my planetary pet!

Caption: The mars Lander explores Mars.

But other poems are intended to be both fun and accurate, like this one:

Then There Were Eight

Poor ball of ice, we know you exist; but you're
Little and solid and we must insist on
Undoing the past, so though you'll be missed, we've
Taken you 
Off of the "real planet" list

Caption: Pluto was removed from the list of planets in 2006.

My friend Vijaya Bodach emailed me last week with a link to this Associated Press story that mentions the number of planets--and it's not eight! The article states, in part: 

"National Geographic Children's Books created the contest in response to the recent announcement by the scientific community that there are now 11 recognized planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Eris."

Dang. Now what? First, I don't even know if this is true. I couldn't find any other mention of this new announcement, including at the site of the International Astronomical Union, the group that makes these kind of decisions. So maybe this is just rumor. Or a group of dissenting scientists?

But either way, it brings the question to mind: What do you do when you have a factual book and then the facts change? Does your book become a quaint relic? Do publishers reprint the book (only if it was selling very well, I assume)? I would guess science writers who write on cutting edge topics face this hazard all the time. I'd love to hear about your experiences.

Today, I ordered Painter X and also CS3. I am still using CS. I cracked after holding out as long as I could. I felt that holding out longer was futile and was not going to serve me anymore. I don't want to be behine the curve, for one thing. For another, there are lots of great features in PS (and beyond) that I'm missing out on (which I'm learning all about from NAPP). Also, now that I have Flash under my belt from day job, I need to build some of my own work with Flash. Can't wait! But for now, it is great to just do some digital painting with my groovy Cintiq. This little fairy Funny Bunnies illustration is a photoshop/analog hybrid: analog ink rapidograph pen drawing, scanned, then photoshop painting galore. Enjoy!