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On the Drawing Board: Upcoming Creative Projects by Toby Dorr
Where ideas bloom, shift, and take flight.
Not everything begins polished. Some things arrive as whispers. A what-if. Perhaps a wild spark scribbled in the margin. This is a space for our creative writing projects in development.
This space honors projects still unfurling—concepts in motion, seeds in the soil, dreams stretching toward the light. From watercolor children’s books to poetic memoirs and half-heard truths, you’ll find them gathered here. Hints of what’s next. Glimpses of what’s possible.
Some ideas may blossom soon. Others may linger, compost, or evolve entirely.
But every one of them matters—because every ripple starts somewhere.
The Archive of Almost
A collection of stories too wild, too quiet, or too sacred to fit anywhere else. This library is for the drafts left open, the letters never sent, the poems scribbled on the back of something else. Surprisingly, t’s where the forgotten things come to be remembered, and where the stories we were too afraid to write finally find a home.
Killing Lisa
As promised.
The final line of Living with Conviction was this:
“And then came January 13, 2021, but that’s a story of its own.”
On January 13, 2026—the fifth anniversary—I fulfill that promise.
Stay tuned.
It’s going to be big.
Fire and Shadow
A book forged in grief, lit by love, and carried by grace.
Some stories are too tender to tell until they’ve been lived all the way through. Fire and Shadow is that kind of story.
It holds the weight of two goodbyes—my daughter Emily, who lived eighteen hours and thirty-one minutes, and my son Greg, who left seventeen days before turning twenty-five. It is not just about their loss. It’s about what they left behind.
This book does not look away from sorrow. Instead it walks with it, listens to it, learns from it. Despite the wound, it explores the sacred thread of love and grief, the purpose hidden in short lives, and the kind of light only fire leaves behind.
Fire and Shadow is about what refines us, not what ruins us. And how, even after death, love keeps becoming.
A Love Letter to the Ideas that Won’t Let Go
There’s a whisper that wakes me.
It’s often 4 AM when a seed of something takes root in the dark—
a phrase, a shape, a shimmer of a thought—
and before I know it, I’m pulled toward the glow of my screen,
drawn like the tide to moonlight.
My head is a studio.
Ideas hang from every beam,
taped to the walls of my mind,
fluttering like leaves in a wind only I can feel.
At the grocery store. On a walk. While folding laundry.
Everywhere I go, the world hands me raw material—
and I can’t help but ask: What could I make of this?
I’ve always wanted to be an artist.
I signed up for a drawing class once.
Four weeks in, I dropped out—
not for lack of wonder,
but because my days are already drawn edge to edge
with creation.
And the truth is, I do draw—
in motion, in metaphor, in meaning.
My medium isn’t charcoal or paint.
And my canvas isn’t paper.
My medium is thought.
Instead, my tool is story.
My brush is fire and tenderness,
the thrum that hums between idea and becoming.
People ask me if I’ll ever retire.
Retire?
And do what—stop breathing?
This is not a job.
It’s not even a calling.
It’s the beating of my heart,
the hum behind my eyes,
the pulse of my dreaming.
This is the shape of my becoming.
The work I make now isn’t just mine.
It’s the essence of me.
And someday, it will be my legacy.
So here’s where I pin the next big idea.
Here’s where the sketches live,
not in graphite, but in rhythm.
Not in pencil, but in possibility.