I am so lazy that even though I knew for months that today’s story was in the works, and that the editors kind of wanted an illustration, I didn’t ever get around to commissioning one. Well, also, in my defense, (a) I rarely know what the podcasts are really about before they’re posted—the final edit wasn’t ready for today’s until after noon—and (b) there was talk of taking photographs of the kids who were in the podcast, and I thought I could do something with those. What we ended up with was headshots, though—I ran them inside the story, but they’re not very useful for the home page. Oh, well.
So all I knew was that it would be kind of a “What should kids read this summer?” piece. And I had a vague recollection of some beach scenes on Vanessa Davis’s awesome site, Spaniel Rage, so I dug around until I found the one I was thinking of. I’d been talking with Vanessa since March about various things: first, a three-page bat mitzvah comic from 2005 that we want to reprint, and next, a commissioned illustration for an essay. But neither of those pieces has yet been scheduled to run, whereas this one was urgent, so today some of her older work (this is from 2004) went up first. Go figure.
It’ll be on the home page only through tomorrow morning; then we’ll be posting a different summer reading piece (for grownups), with some of my usual brilliant Flickr-mining on the front. Why didn’t I use this drawing to illustrate that piece, which will be up for two days, over the holiday? Duh. Poor planning.