I just had my first review posted on Amazon, by the lovely Keith Schoch of Teach With Picture Books. So, for at least a little while, I have a perfect 5-star rating as an author. Feels pretty good...

The e-books are ready! Kindle versions and the universal epub file type as well. Remember that Shakespeare's Complete Paragon is the combination of the 42 illustrations found in the other two books.

I've just submitted the last of the files for review before being officially published. The e-book versions are available now, and the print versions should be ready by February, but as far as I can tell, I can get out from behind this computer and, you know, sleep... or eat... or go for a walk. It's been a while.

Just finished designing the back cover of Shakespeare's Zoo, and I think I love it. It's going to be hard to top for Shakespeare's Menagerie. Also, what do I put for the text on the back of the second book? The same thing? Maybe a reference to the fact that it's the second in a series? I don't know. This wasn't in the original plan.

So, it turns out, if you want to make a full-color book with a ton of pages, it's expensive to produce. So expensive, that if I were to price it in a range that would allow anyone to want to buy it, I would get negative royalties (insert sad trombone sound here).

So, the illustrations have been divided up, and I'm publishing two books! I tried to divide them evenly, so as not to get too many quotations from one source in each book, separated birds and bugs, etc... But now that I've been working with and formatting the two different sets of illustrations, there's definitely one book I like better. I won't tell you which one.

I got on a roll, and decided I wanted to be done today. So I'm done. Today. Not with the whole thing; I've got a lot of formatting and detail work ahead of me, but all of the art is done. All of it. Forty-two animals, painstakingly rendered. I'm exhausted. This is the very last one:

And yet, so many more to do before I'm finally done...