Skin Troubles and Soul Ailments

This is a picture of discarded earlier versions of a book called Skin Trouble, dating back some 14 years. These are just the printouts and hand-drawn thumbnails, not the earlier outlines, scripts, redrafts and abandoned versions; the huge digital archive of ideas, detours, scraps, notes, anecdotes, reference and half-sketched scenes that won’t make the final cut.

I think, over the years, I’ve attempted to definitively re-draft this project around fifteen different times, each one exploring a different potential direction. It’s the experiments and the previous efforts that, ultimately, cohere it. There’s no short cut; you have to go through it, peaks and troughs, to get to where you’re going. Getting my wife Angela Watson onboard to properly co-author it was a major step forward in helping find the structure that worked best.

Have to do it right. Almost there, now.