Time continues to swirl and twirl and slip along, even when I’m not noticing.  I look up and days have gone by and I wonder “what the heck have I been doing”?  OH YEAH..working on a tattoo textbook!!  OY…I literally had no idea how much time this was going to take.

My little idea of writing a beginner’s guide to tattooing, kept morphing, and growing and getting more involved and complex. This last 6 months, outside of working with my students at the studio, I have spent all my spare time working on this project.

I keep getting peeks at the finish line, but each new phase, reveals more editing, more photos, more step by step, more wrangling this thing in to place.

And that’s not counting all the marketing, publishing info to sort and learn when you’re publishing a tattoo textbook.

I have put aside so many of my fun pursuits to buckle down and DO THIS…doing the work.  The necessary work.

Don’t get wrong. There is some fun here too but HAVING to be diligent in research and explanation makes this endeavor a bit more tedious than my usual CRAY CRAY art and writing stuffs.

And people keep asking “how’s the textbook coming along?”    “It’s coming along” I say with a sigh, wishing I could whip out the full-fledged published book and say “SEE WHAT I MADE?!?!”  But alas, that delight is still several months away.

But I keep doing the work, kicking ass, visualizing how delicious it will feel to fling this monster out to the public and watch the people scramble…to…uh…to buy the book…yeah!

“Writing a book is an adventure to begin with, it is a toy and an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.”

~Winston Churchill

So, my absence from this bloggy arena has been filled with another kind of diligent writing.

But as Arnold Schwarzeneggar says “I’ll Be Baaack!”

~Still fierce, still a Pollyanna,

Shelly