I had this running joke with a friend of mine, named Sean. Sean is a writer, or well he says he is. For the longest time, I had yet to see anything that he’s ever written, but he would always talk about this book and that book and he was working on. So the running joke was always calling him out on finishing his books.
For a few years, I decided to give him a few gag gifts for his birthday each year. I won’t mention them all here, but one of them was a book filled with these epic Facebook posts that he would do and many of his friends would look forward to these posts, because they were usually about something that happened to Sean. He tends to get into ridiculous situations a lot. The gag on with that book was that I published a book before him, with his own writings no less.
The next year, I knew I needed to top myself. Sean had finally given me one of his short stories. I had heard him talk about it, but I never got the full story until I read it. I took that story, which was about how he was carjacked by a Crips gang member, and a few others, some being from his Facebook posts, now rewrote them as a children’s book.
I had our friend, Megan, do the illustrations, as she’s a great artist. She colored them with watercolor painting. I took her paintings and my writing, based on Sean’s stories, and published another book. Again, he as yet to publish anything.
But I didn’t stop there. The book was great, but it’s just another book. So to top myself, I took those paintings that Megan did, Photoshopped out certain objects and created animated video based on the book. I even created a character called, Skippy, to narrate the video.
This extra video is a behind the scenes of how Megan and I created everything.
