Hello folks! Just a quick update on the “What’s-Robbi-Up-To” front. I’m working on the next Idiots’Book, you see. Because yesterday I drove over to Columbia (MD) to pick up the many boxes of Bobbledy Books Volume 15, The Luckiest, which we’ll be packaging up and sending out tomorrow. So, of course, that leaves today full of nothing but the next thing to do.

Matthew has written an odd tale about a kitchen sponge, whose working title is “Mobley the Kitchen Sponge”. Or maybe it’s “Mobley the Kitchen Sponge Goes to the Moon”. Before we started Bobbledy, he tried to write a children’s book a day as an experiment to see if he actually had enough ideas to make Bobbledy happen. Mobley was one of the bad ideas that is definitely not a children’s book, but the story just charms me. And so I’ve willed him into being, more or less:

Now, it was only after I drew it that I realized that SpongeBob Squarepants is actually a sponge. How could I not have known that? For some reason I thought he was a piece of toast or something. Ah well. This is not a book about SpongeBob.

I’ve started thumbnailing, which every good illustrator does, but which I never did until I started working on the version of Babies Ruin Everything that will be published by a real, live, big-time publisher.

It turns out that good illustrators know what they’re doing. It saves me a lot of time. Mostly, it saves me from getting way too type A working out the details of a composition that Matthew ends up telling me stinks (he’s usually right).

With all that time I’m saving, I could probably finish a couple more books. But don’t tell Matthew. I’ll be eating ice cream and looking at hedgehogs on youtube instead (OMG THEY ARE SO CUTE).