You have to start somewhere, and Jana and I started with “The Potato Sack Princess.”

Did you not see that one on the shelves at Barnes and Noble?

Here’s why.

It was toward the end of our stay in Brooklyn and during our year in New Paltz, New York, that we began working on project ideas together. The first was a comic based on an odd little man I knew named Fernando — he was friendly mentally challenged fellow who looked a bit like a mobster and walked around with a little dog named Blackie. I befriended him and used to talk to him all the time, and he used to say the funniest, most surreal things. I really liked him and he inspired me to write about him in a fantasy setting. The story would take place in another dimension and would involve his Japanese sister Sushi, his mother (who looked like Divine, I believe), and some evil woman who wanted to marry him. Sketching out the general story and characters was as far as we got.

Concurrent to that, Jana had been working on her own children’s book story that was based on something involving her job as a nanny. She hit a narrative snag and asked me for help — I did, ended up rewriting it, and it was a partnership.

Somewhere along the line we left Brooklyn for New Paltz — New York City seemed like it was falling apart at the time, this was 1987, and we needed to clear our heads. So we moved to the country, took menial jobs, and tried to figure out what we wanted to do with ourselves and where exactly we wanted to be. During all this we continued work on our story, “The Potato Sack Princess,” with the plan to try and sell it once it was in a place to present to publishers.

Eventually we did sell it to a small educational publisher also in upstate New York — it would be part of what they called their reading series, which I think meant it would be utilized in school for beginner readers. We were thrilled, we took it as a sign that we did something right, even though it was only for a limited, specific release, and the money was hardly the mother lode — $100 split between us.

We decided to build on it as an appeal to move forward with our lives and immediately set about a plan to move to Boston and get our lives started.

Before we left, we went to meet Mr. Kimnitz, the editor and publisher, in his house. He was a mumbly sort of guy who didn’t wear socks. He seemed nice. The business seemed real, and I still have no reason to doubt that it wasn’t.

I also have no reason to believe it was ever published. And I have no memory of actually being paid for it. But all that is okay — the real point of making the book was making the book. It was part of our process to figuring out what in the world we wanted to do with our lives. The sale was just the little signal from the world that we needed, something we could interpret as “Good start! Keep moving!” and then do so.

In simple terms, it motivated us.

Exactly a month after we decided to move to Boston, we were there, hauling our stuff into our studio apartment in Back Bay, in a beautiful neighborhood just across from the Charles River. “The Potato Sack Princess” had more than paid us back for the time we put into it, and 20 years later I’m still very satisfied with the way it all came out.