Sunday, February 3, 2013

9. Look What I Found II: A SEQUEL TO A BESTSELLER


I finally found my sequel to my previous bestseller. It’s another “book” that I wrote—but with a vast improvement—it had illustrations done by my sister, Susan—an artist prodigy at the age of 7, or so I thought.


This “Saints for Everyone”, obviously stemmed from my early interest in santos. The title is a total misnomer as all the saints featured were females. Maybe I was reserving a future edition for male saints, but I can’t recall that now—this was 38 years ago, remember?


But I do know I used my father’s Daily Missal as a reference to the lives of saints listed on the table of contents. The missal had this Calendar of Saints, that had short, biographical sketches of saints. Of course, I went for the lesser known ones—like St. Symphorosa, St. Frances of Rome—but I also chose those who died gory, dramatic deaths like Sts. Joan, Ursula and Maria Goretti.

 See how improved it is? This one is hard-bound, using a leftover Christmas gift wrapper to wrap the cardboard covers. And, each chapter was typed using our Brothers manual typewriter. The spacing, pagination and margins were perfect!


Of course, the illustrations are, well, err..hmm, a bit of a problem. On second thought, if truth be told, the illustrations are awful, horrific and ugly. They look every bit the effort of a 7 year old. But come to think of it, my sister was 7 years old.


I now conclude that our literary collaboration didn’t’ work out very well. A case of artistic differences, definitely. A clash of talents. And that’s how my second book became…a coloring book!

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