🌟 Darlings update (halfway through)

Above: my progress on the Save the Darlings challenge.

I figured since I’m a little more than halfway through my self-imposed "Save the Darlings" challenge of illustrating a children’s book in 30 days, I’d give you an update.

It’s going well! Really well. Flip through it here.

If you are new or can’t remember what this whole challenge was, here’s a refresher:

• I decided I really wanted to “go for it” and do one of the many creative projects that’s been sitting on my passion project bucket list for I don’t know how long. It’s called “Save the Darlings” in defiance of the age-old wisdom that you must “kill your darlings” to experience success.

• Specifically I decided I wanted to illustrate this book — it’s one of the books I hand-drew for my child with special needs. He gets really overwhelmed when his environment changes so I am in the habit of making these social stories to help explain things to him. You can watch more about that here.

• But, because I’m me and I believe that strategy, planning and rest are critical components of any creative project — there’s a twist. I imposed certain limits.

• For example, I have to do the whole project in 30 days. I started Feb 23, so that means I have until March 23. Regardless of where I am on March 23 — that sucker is getting emailed to the printer.

• Additionally, I have to get the project done in 2 hours a day/14 hours per week. I’m allowed to rollover additional time if I choose.

• Extra bonus points if I get it done in EVEN LESS TIME! I throw myself a little party every time I do this. It’s really helpful in motivating myself to actually do it every day.

• I set timers every day and I time myself, too. I’ve been experimenting with the best way, neurologically speaking, to handle the time aspect. I found that if the timer is set too high (like if I put my entire rollover amount of time in a timer, which is now quite a lot) then I tend to move more slowly whereas if I set my timers in 20min increments, I tend to be more efficient.

Anyways, now that I’ve explained it…how am I doing??

As of Day 17 (yesterday), I’ve COMPLETELY FINISHED the first draft of illustration for every single page!

And guess what….I did this in 20 hours, 15 minutes, and 26 seconds.

Just to remind you the total time allotment I gave myself is 60 hours total or 2/hrs per day over 30 days. So I’m at the halfway point, and I have used way less than half the amount of my allocated time.

Most of the time, I don’t even come close to dipping into my bank of “surplus minutes.”

If I someone had told me 17 days ago that I could ABSOLUTELY finish an entire draft of a set of children’s book illustrations within the equivalent of half of a standard 40-hr work week…I am not quite sure I would have believed them. Honestly, I’ve never done an entire book of illustration by myself before, and I didn’t know what to expect. I just went about the planning of this the way that I normally go about planning.

When it comes to productivity and my creative project planning approach in general…I have SO MUCH to talk about there. I’ll save that for a different email. Suffice it to say, the way I am going through this challenge is a little window into how I approach team management and sustainability of hoo-man effort — just on a teeny tiny scale of 1.

I’m also not going to say much about the quality of the illustration because I want you to judge that for yourself. I hope you like it, but in the end I did sort of make this for me (Client Cathy is quite happy so far). I wouldn’t necessarily bill myself as “an illustrator"…So I am happy to have made something that is generally stylistically cohesive, if a bit simple.

What next?

Well, there is still a bit to do. Yesterday, I took another planning day so I can structure my time effectively for the next two weeks. After this week, I’m aiming to be done with my second pass through to fix all the little things that have been bugging me, and also tie off loose ends. Example: I learned through my research yesterday that my book printing place won’t print a book with fewer than 16 pages. Not counting the front and back cover, I have 14 pages. So I might add a dedication and/or an “about the author” page, and an interior title page. I do also have to make a back cover.

Look, I’m going to go because I’ve talked your eyeballs off. If you want to stay up to date on progress, you can check out the reels section of my IG here. I've been posting my daily progress.

Bye for now…and happy Monday!

Cathy