When I sold my first picture book, How to Find a Fox, the publisher gave me three weeks to illustrate forty pages. My agent at the time negotiated the timeframe up to four weeks.

Around exactly the same time, I'd started a storyboard revisionist job at DreamWorks Animation. The assignment was chaotic and I was putting in unpaid overtime nearly every day (and folks who have worked at DWTV know the conditions there).

After I finished the picture book, I rolled right into working on a comic anthology submission that I'd procrastinated on, and my art style was proving more time-consuming than I expected.

So for about a couple months there, I was working ridiculous hours. Get into the office around 8 am, leave around 8 am, go home eat quickly maybe watch TV for half an hour, then draw until 2-3 am. Weekends, keep working. I was tired, but I loved drawing, so I didn't mind.

I can remember, almost to the day, the moment I felt something change in my back. I'd heard artists complain about their back pain before then and I would loftily think "Gee, that sounds brutal, I'm sure glad I don't have back pain."

It changed in those couple of months.

The pain never went away. It only got worse. There was a week a year or so later that it got so bad I could barely sit in my chair at work. I set an appointment with a specialist. An X-ray and an MRI later, and they referred me to a physical therapist.

Since then it's been a daily game of pain mitigation. It's never completely gone. Sometimes I don't really feel it, but if I *think* about it, my brain finds where it quietly simmers. I'm thinking about all that now, in bed, deciding on a semi-comfortable position to sleep in.

Anyway, all that to say, I don't draw like I used to.

Okay so I'm not gonna call this person out but I'm going to address this QT and the notion of "don't take that deal" as if I willingly agreed to illustrate a picture book in three weeks.

I sold How to Find a Fox in March 2015. The publication date was for November 2016. It was fast by picture book standards. Usually picture books are bought and have a release date that's two years out, but the schedule still allowed for plenty of time to illustrate the book.

What happened is the contract negotiation took a while. Several months. After I signed, we went into revisions, first on the text, then on the art. The revisions were pretty light and went smoothly.

After the revisions were all turned in, I was told my deadline for final art. The combination of the delay in negotiating the contract and the delay in getting notes from my editor and designer ate up all my production time. They didn't move my deadline to make up for lost time.

I appealed to my agent., whose job it is to intercede when something like this happens. She was only able to negotiate an extra week, bringing my production time to four weeks. She explained that sometimes publishers do this as a "test" to new illustrators. And that was it.

The contract was signed, I was a debut author, and I was being "tested." I didn't want to screw up and hurt my career on my very first book. So I met the deadline.

And frankly, this sort of thing has happened to me more than once, even with the experience and reputation I have.

It's why I rail so much about editors giving longer schedules to illustrators. I'm convinced the problem is an industry where the majority of professionals do not have illustration experience and don't understand the labor.

Especially in a pipeline workflow, which illustrated books often are--the work being handed from one person to the next. There are always delays in book production. When the delays build up, the person at the end of the chain picks up the slack. That person is usually an artist.

And the response to these scenarios is always "get an agent," but an agent HAS to understand illustration work. At the very least, they have to understand that illustration is different than writing, and needs different considerations. Otherwise, that agent won't protect you.

Anyway, I have about a decade's worth of experience being screwed over on schedules and ultimately feeling bad about the work I've done because I'm never given time to do work I can feel proud of.

I don't *think* anyone's doing this deliberately, but it's been a decade and I'm still yelling about it. I don't take jobs with impossible schedules... but I know some artist is, because not every artist can afford to turn down work. We've all got to keep the bills paid.

The solution is so simple. Talk to artists about what they need. Give them time to do the work without having to sacrifice their health and sanity. If you're in the business of making illustrated books, you should want the illustrator to be happy.

Oh and hey, writers... I've seen some of the schedules for graphic novel adaptations of prose novels. If an artist is being hired to work on your property, you should be thinking about this, too.