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“My Home, Your Home”, an educational children’s book from Cloverleaf books, and some samples below.

The work on the tree house continues. This entry details the pressure washed stage.

Before. The oldness and the grayness.

Above, check out the 3DS wiggle pic of this event.

Disorienting cleanliness.

Behold! I am chronicling the adventures of restoring and maintaining my treehouse. This is a little side project of mine, a "studio away from studio" if you will.

Here is a brief tour of the establishment.

I've been a busy bee for the past few weeks. One of my big accomplishments was finishing up my Sketchbook Project 2012. I really enjoyed letting loose and experimenting with this project. I started it at a time when I literally hadn't drawn a thing in MANY months. I hit a major creative slump last year, and the combination of this and the PiBoIdMo challenge really whipped me into shape - and unlike how I feel about physical exercise (hee hee) I LIKED it! Getting started was tough, but once I marked up a few pages, images just poured right out. I played with technique and style. I didn't worry much about making mistakes - they just turned into happy accidents.
I encourage anyone interested in trying the Sketchbook Project to just do it. The book was a lot shorter this year than the 2011 books, so that made it way less intimidating for me. I can't wait to go visit the books on tour with other artist friends too. Go check it out here.

For the sparse amount of free time I've had this is the most productive I've felt in at least a year! I've been loving the PiBoIdMo challenge this year. Not only the amazing posts from all the guest authors and illustrators (thank you Tara Lazar!) but the actual results! Halfway through the challenge and I'm going strong. I feel like once I took the pressure off myself to finish certain goals, the ideas are just flowing out for the challenge. I know hard work is ahead when I try to revisit these ideas and write picture book drafts, but I'm looking forward to picking from so many different directions.
I'm also happily working away in my Sketchbook Project. Another place that I've just let loose without worrying too much about the results. I really have been missing out by not painting in my sketchbooks. It's really quite freeing!

That little bird didn't give up. She's made an awesome nest right outside our front door. It's absolutely adorable. Every time I come home I look up and see her long tail feather. She built that nest for a week non-stop. Forget how windy it can be there. My daughter thinks the bird is super social and that's why she had to build it right by the front door where the wind chimes sing every afternoon. I have to agree. I guess she needs a little entertainment while she sits there and takes good care of her eggs.

So I run into the store on my way home and I stand in the checkout line. I'd just been to a Body Pump class at the gym, maybe that's why I noticed what I did. There's this guy at the cash register ringing up my lemon and coffee and I notice he's wearing silver bracelets. Lots and lots of silver bracelets. It's crazy. I ask him if they're heavy. He pumps his hand up and says, two and a quarter pounds. Two. And. A quarter. Pounds. Did I say there were a lot of bracelets. Big chunky bracelets. I check his left hand. Nada. Not one. I wonder about the lopsidedness of it. I wonder whether he ever takes them off. I wonder how long it takes to put them all on. I wonder if he sleeps with two and a half pounds of bracelets on. I ask if they're all from the same manufacturer and he says, Nah, they're from all over the world. Cool.

Today is one of those wonderful, warm California days. It's so great to see the sun again. On my way to the gym I stopped by the library. Suspecting it was closed on Mondays, I just wanted to swing by anyway and check out our new neighborhood. Sure enough, the library was closed. But what surprised me was a box full of free books left outside the front door marked "creative writing and teaching." So I flipped through the books to see what interested me––a 1983 printing of Little Women [which, to date, I've never read] boasting "now a major motion picture" on the cover, prompting me to check out Louisa May Alcott's Filmography; On Creative Writing by Paul Engle where he states "Writing is like making love––it is astonishing how far pure instinct (if it really is pure) will carry you; and a 1973 printing of Structuring your novel: From basic idea to finished manuscript––A yellowed, clipped newspaper article spilled out of pages 90 and 91. The article, entitled "Strictly Personal" is by an author only noted with the name, Harris below a line art illustration of his face––in it, he belabors the point that Romeo and Juliet is really an "anti-romantic" play. Pages 90 and 91 are nestled within a chapter about employing description, four sentences in bold read "Keep explanation to a minimum," "Establish the motivation and viewpoint of the character," "Enlarge the arena of your own five senses," "Employ description to arouse an emotional response in your reader."

This is where I feel the sun so strong on my arm, and my giddiness at finding the books and the clipping in particular so dorky, until a man and a woman walk up to find the library closed too. The lady asks me if I'm a local, and by the way I'm all sprawled out on the sidewalk salivating over discarded books I have no idea why. I say yes and she proceeds to ask me about an unusual bird she keeps seeing––a black one with yellow eyes. I've never seen such a bird, but it sounds creepy. I asked her if it was. She said no, not really, but it bugged her that they've started to see them in a remote part of Alaska where they live and hadn't ever seen them before and now they've spotted them here too. So, I guess they kind of bugged her. We wished each other well after chatting about my lack of local bird knowledge, the beautiful weather, Alaska and my grandfather and I plucked up a few books and headed to the gym.

I forget all about the black bird with the yellow eye. But then I google them and find out they are called Brewer's Blackbirds and I also discover there's and iPhone App to easily identify birds. But, of course there is. I download it.

And I think about years from now, how rare it will be for any yellowed, newspaper clipping to fall from a book.

We've all been asking the question. Where is publishing going next? In particular, I've been asking what an aspiring author should do in this day and age? Go traditional? Self-publish? This is a not-to-be-missed post about the future from A Newbie's Guide to Publishing entitled "Ebooks and Self-Publishing - A Dialog Between Authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath." Which makes me wonder if it's like Glenda the Good Witch said, you've had the power all along. Srsly thinking about clicking my ruby slippers together.

Today I went to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned. I really think that one shouldn't move AND have their teeth cleaned too. Moving isn't really fun. Neither is having your teeth cleaned. But...NO cavities:) We've had some powerful storms here. Hail this morning. Over the weekend, on Saturday night, the storm was so crazy it blew over a portion of our grape-stake fence, the one between us and a neighbor up the hill. We went out to get stakes to make repairs and when we got back our neighbors had already shored the fence up. Nice surprise. Made getting the repairs done much easier. And it was a cool way to meet the neighbors.

We moved into our tree house on 3/4 and moved out of butterfly town 3/11, the day of the Tsunami warning in California. Tomorrow all our stuff from LA arrives––a Tsunami of furniture, and belongings you might say. Moves are so incredibly dramatic. We really didn't need the backdrop of a major catastrophe. Our daughter lives in Santa Cruz. It's estimated that the harbor there suffered anywhere from 10M to 20M in damages. On the 11th, the day I was cleaning out our rental I thought what a bummer it would be to leave this world while cleaning out a refrigerator. Then I thought of all the devastation and I just can't get my head around it. It's so much. People here are talking about radiation and carrying Geiger counters and iodine pills and closing the two plants we have in Southern California. And I can't even find the lids to my pans.

We moved ourselves out of butterfly town, and left it to the professionals to move our stuff up from LA. It took us eight days to move everything. Every night I needed two Advil, a ton of water and lots of hand lotion. I can't get enough hand lotion.

And in the middle of all of this we had a gigantic surprise. My daughter flew in from FL and Joe's best friend flew in from LA to join his mom and Mx and we all had an amazing celebration of our new tree house and our 25th wedding anniversary. It was my first surprise ever and I absolutely loved it. The girls and I climbed one of our trees and our house really became a home that day.

Image via Wikipedia

Where was your secret hideout when you were a kid?

Related Articles

• God tells guy to build really, really, really large treehouse (boingboing.net)
• Treehouse Survives Manhattan Legal Fight (newyork.cbslocal.com)
• Evil Hideouts (and quotes) from The Looney DM (looneydm.blogspot.com)

Took me a while to finish this one. In the name of self-healing I decided to finish it tonight, and to my surprise there really wasn't much more to add, mainly the paper airplane & their smiling faces. It feels good it's done. We'll see if there are anymore treehouse kiddies in me. Could be the last one in a while... I guess time will tell. Using relationships & other people for material is tricky. Never thought there was an artistic angle to being self-sustainable, haha. Well, new personal goal is to find my inner muse so let the adventure begin!

they now each have fun toys!

I really need a new sketchbook. Drawing on the inside cover is too much. Anyway, saw a tree today that looked like two but was actually one and it gave me an idea for a new tree house painting! Here's the rough sketch. It comes from the heart. I'm so excited to paint it :)

you might like to know that you are not alone.

http://drawn.ca/2007/04/19/original-little-prince-drawing-found-in-japan/

(Thanks, Luc)