I am illustrating my next book which will be about the five years we lived in Karachi, Pakistan, from 1973 to 1978. The kids finished grade school there; Mary administrated an English language program, and I did research on rodent pests for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Looking back on it, it was a great period in our lives, but it was at times difficult. Several years after we left Pakistan, we visited a friend we had known from our Karachi days. He had some video of his time there and, watching it, I was shocked how grim it looked. People were very poor, the streets were dirty. It didn’t look like a nice place to live, let along raise children. The human memory cleans things up, filters out much of the bad stuff and leaves a nice rosy picture of the good old days.
This book will have 34 illustrations in 80 pages or so. I am about half done with the illustrations; the text is in the rough draft phase. I am taking George Saunders’s advice to heart: rewrite over and over. Making the illustrations takes discipline; I’d often rather be painting something else. Here are a couple of examples of what you will see in this book. Each illustration has a story behind it. To know the stories behind the fox and the burning house you will have to read the book.
The book about our Peace Corps days is now available. To get a copy message me or visit http://www. thisonly.org.