Success & Failure

And The In-Between Where We Call Home

---

I’m back. It’s been hard to write, but I’ve slowly put something together in anticipation of my new picture book coming out this Tuesday! A Story No One Has Ever Heard Before.

(Preorder here!)

Here goes…

---

On the heels of some great news (a starred Kirkus review of my debut picture book - I still can’t believe it), I simultaneously rejoiced and fumbled at the one-yard line. My first picture book was going well, but the second book I was working on wasn’t. After looking at the new manuscript, my editor asked for some changes before she could give the green light. I sat back, cracked my knuckles, and steered the thing right into a ditch. I had somehow taken a promising manuscript and actually made it less sellable. (As of this writing, I still haven’t figured it out.)

---

---

This experience uncannily mirrored the time I sold my first New Yorker cartoon. I’ve finally made it, I thought. Ten years of hard work, but I sold one! I figured that the first cartoon would “break the seal,” and more cartoon would easily follow. But I was wrong. Only a few weeks later, I sat in front of Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker at the time, and he gave me some concrete advice.

“Draw better,” he said, not unkindly, handing me back my cartoons without holding on to any for further review.

Instead of drawing better, I did the next best thing: I decided to quit. I was crushed. How could I fail after succeeding?

Once a few weeks passed of me not actually knowing what else to do with my time, I unquit. I said to myself that I’d give it a year. Ten cartoons a week. No more stops and starts every couple of months. No more emotional rollercoasters. I’d take one last go at it and give myself a realistic amount of runway to either take off or plow into the forest at the far end.

But it was hard. I somehow had the motivation to submit cartoons to The New Yorker for ten years but found it almost too challenging to make it over even one speed bump past that first triumph. Talking about it recently with my friend Jason Adam Katzenstein (a wonderful cartoonist) at a book launch of another (wonderful cartoonist) friend, Amy Kurzweil, Jason commiserated in how hard that second hurdle was to jump. “You’ve used up all your energy,” he said. A few days later, he added that “The first one after the first one is its own frustration.”

---

---

There’s something about knowing it’s possible to do something, because you’ve done it, but realizing that repeating whatever it was that you did the first time isn’t a given.

I think this also speaks to how we perceive others and how we then intentionally, or unintentionally, reset expectations for ourselves. A cartoon of mine that runs in The New Yorker could have been sold years ago. I feel so lucky to see it on the page, and at the same time, I’m struggling with my most recent batch. No one sees where I am right now. It’s like the light of a star in the night sky, but the light is from a million years ago. (And yet, I look at a friend’s cartoon in the same issue, and say, “wow, they’re killing it!” I am my own worst student.)

---

---

A few months after I started drawing ten cartoons a week I sold my second cartoon. It felt like selling my first. And soon more sales started to trickle in. In a way, each sale still feels like my first. I both hope it will happen and never expect it to.

And if I was able to do one thing a second time, maybe I can do another thing a second time and figure out this new book. It might just be the second time I do a thing a second time! I think. I wasn’t a math major.

But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I’m trying to enjoy the ride. The joy of reading my very own book to my very own kindergarten students is indescribable. (The feeling when one of those students takes one look at the book at says, “Oh, I know this one already,” when he’s the first kid to ever hear it in the entire world, is also indescribable.)

So, I’m back. I hope. Thank you for still being here reading this. It means so much.

Please share, please subscribe, and please preorder! It really helps!

And please let me know what questions you have and what you’re curious about hearing next. I’ve only dipped my toe into the world of children’s books, but it’s exciting!

Thanks,

Avi