You can guess, I’ve already decided to publish this work
I’ve read this manuscript by Jan Andreas a few times now and sat down with Jan to talk it through. I like Jan. They remind me a little of myself some years ago. They/them are their preferred pronouns. Artists. That’s fine by me. A fledgling illustrator, they admit their drawings have inconsistencies, though the rawness is part of the charm. They self-published the work in 2020 and now hope to find a proper publisher. They told me it was our publication of The Divine Mind that drew them in — a work of similar jaunt.
Their suggested title is Me and My Shadow: Social Distancing 2020. As editor and publisher, titles remain my decision; they are marketing tools in the end. Still, the title works. It’s been five years, but the pandemic lingers in so many ways — in the literal persistence of virus variants, often unacknowledged, shadows in that sense. And in this new dark age of politics we inhabit, an era of shadows of another sort.
The work is a kind of graphic novel, scarcely thirty-five pages, yet packed with story, quotations, political questions, and cosmic reflection. A natural-science question about shadows and dimensionality gets resolved in a quiet encounter with a bee. It’s psychological and philosophical throughout.
Shadow, as I’ve been calling it, is meta and recursive, with Jan portraying themself as Jay, and then symbolized as a slippery shadow they chase and flee. It has layers. You can guess, I’ve already decided to publish this work.
Last Updated on December 6, 2025 | Published: November 21, 2025