An Entire Book In Two Pages

An Entire Book In Two Pages
In October 2007, I was riding high. My first book was coming out and I was on a plane to New York City to shoot a Travel Channel Halloween special. I was jet setting and someone else was paying the bill. I was happy.

It was early in the day, and the reality of flying to and from a faraway city in one day hadn't set in. I hadn't yet felt the dehydration and sunburn of working on an outdoor set all day. I hadn't realized that I wasn't getting paid for this. I was going to be famous for 5 minutes and I was happy about it.

I was so happy that I called my publisher to say thanks. That is when I received even more good news. Extreme Pumpkins the book was going into its second printing, the first had sold out. It was also time to start thinking about writing a second book. My publisher said that I should do another proposal. This time, I could just prepare a table of contents with brief descriptions of each item.

I like to work in an unusual way. I propose a really large list of ideas and then the publisher or some other sane person removes all of the ideas that are absolutely awful. In the end, we have a great list of ideas.

I sat on the plane, my head full of nothing but pumpkins and I wrote these two pages. What you see is a scan from my idea book. The ideas must have been swirling in my head for some time because all at once they flowed onto paper. It was a rush. I thought I would share the raw, scribbled ideas with you. You can see from the top of the page that I wanted to call the book "Son of Extreme Pumpkins".

Update: I carved many of these designs for my second book "Extreme Pumpkins 2" and the book was published in September of 2008.

By the way, you can click the image to see it at maximum resolution.