Feb 8, 2026
As my mentor and close friend, Kat Klockow (aka “RedCat”)—who has spent her entire professional life in comics, editing, writing, and now publishing—once told me, it takes about three years to create a book from start to finish. Now that I’m going through this grueling process myself, I realize just how right she was.
The concept of a bilingual book is nothing new, but what I want to do is something I haven’t seen in the market before: creating interactive pages (with flaps or sliders) that allow readers to switch between Traditional and Simplified Chinese and remove Pinyin/Zhuyin when desired. Because of this, the journey will likely take much longer than three years. This also doesn’t account for the fact that my art skills, website development, social media presence, marketing experience, and Chinese ability are all basic at best.
To help build reader interest and show that I’m actively working on the bilingual book, I’ll be posting progress updates, “learning opportunities” (a.k.a. banging-my-head-against-the-wall moments), and my wandering paths. Hopefully, this will give readers a glimpse into my thought process and help them understand why creating the book is taking so long!
Once the book is about 90% complete, my hope is to launch a Kickstarter so it can finally be published. Along the way, I plan to market the book through my website content and a social media presence (TBD). Thank goodness my friend Kat is there to help hold my hand!
Kat Challenge (Watercolor) To help keep me motivated and teach me the ropes, Kat has graciously agreed to set up biweekly meetings with me. At our last meeting, she challenged me to pick up watercolor painting and create one simple picture. I honestly haven’t watercolored since my Dumpster Dragon webcomic days—which was… nine years ago! Holy moly! It felt great to pick up a paintbrush again, and BB (my child, whom I call “Bao Bei”) kept insisting that I include her in the picture, lol. As you can see, I left the yellow boxes blank in the color version, since this is where the Chinese characters will go (see the black-and-white version below for reference). I purposely chose characters for the yellow boxes that differ between Traditional and Simplified Chinese, since this is where I envision the flaps or sliders will go in the hardcopy book.
Bilingual Webcomic – Another fun side journey I’ve been exploring is creating an interactive bilingual webcomic (see test example below). While I still need to update the artwork to better fit a webcomic format, I’m loving the idea and concept, especially since I haven’t seen anything like this online before. My goal is to add audio so readers can hear Chinese while selecting their preferred written format.