Just thought I would share a few of the pictures with you that I have been working on.

Sort of give you an idea what the finished book will look like.

Of course, there will be funny words on all these pages…

And an amusing story to follow along with…

And lots of things for kids to think about and talk to their parents about…

And there will be a nice… I hesitate to use the word ‘moral’… but maybe ‘life lesson’ might not be far from the truth… at the end.

The thing is… and this is a ‘thing’ that I have thought a lot about in my life, being all art-side-of-the-brain and all… is that artists, any kind of artist; writers, musicians, whatever, might not have a responsibility to include positive messages in their art, but they have an opportunity to do so. If you can get people interested in your art, and then slip in some positive messages, or even some things that might make people think about life, you have done something important. You have reached people who wouldn’t have heard your message if you had just tried to talk to them about it. Maybe that is why comic books have reached such a level of popularity. Mixed in with all the violence and super powers are timeless messages about the fight between good and evil, and picking a side in that fight, and using your powers for a positive purpose.

Since I started writing songs and playing the guitar and singing, I have put messages in my music… (you can hear a few of them if you click the button in my top bar called something clever like; ‘My original song videos’)… My action/humor science fiction series of novels, while exciting and funny and obviously poking fun at all the things humans take too seriously, is full of positive messages. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but even in this blog, between being silly and facetious, I slip an actual message in now and then.

If you think about it, all the best art you ever were aware of did the same thing. I don’t mean that every song or book ever written had subliminal meaning, but there were lessons you could take away from them, and things you wanted to ponder in them. The Beatles were particularly good at this. ‘I want to hold you hand’ might be just a simple song about love, or it might not. ‘Give peace a chance’ is pretty blatant. ‘All you need is love’ might be an oversimplification. But all their words are lodged in all of our self-consciousnesses, … (why is that not a word, spell-checker???)… and the words meant things to all of us on a deeper level than just the words themselves should have meant.